Started the Hen House

With the cost of everything going up and the fact that we never know what commercial chickens have been fed to produce assembly line eggs we have decided it is time to own our own flock of chickens to produce Rocking-H Farm raised eggs.

I want you to understand we are raising them only for eggs. I am not raising them for meat. I will swap eggs for fresh chickens if anyone wants to but, I can't raise them, name them and then eat them. When I was a child we raised chicks for eggs and meat and it was a very natural thing. I am just too soft hearted to kill something I raise. If I were raising hundreds of chickens I would not have any problem with it, but when you have 15 or 20 hens named Lucy and Ethel and Myrtle you just need to take care of them. Feed them and nurture them and they will take give you protein filled eggs and feed you. Then when they get old they can retire and live their lives in the lap of luxury until their days are done...naturally. Enough of that.

We decided several months ago that when the weather warmed we were going to buy some laying hens, build a hen house and raise some chicks. As of today, we are well under way. We went to our local lumber yard/ building materials dealer yesterday and bought everything we need to build a high end chicken house for our soon to be purchased hens. I am building it to last. It is constructed of landscape timbers, pressure treated wood and barn siding. We started the construction today and I hope to have it completed on Saturday. The house is large enough to have sixteen nesting boxes which means if we can get sixteen laying hens we will have more than enough eggs for us and plenty to share with our friends and family. There may even be enough to swap for some frying chickens, I don't know.

The weather has been great here and tomorrow and Saturday are supposed to be even better than today so we should make good progress on our "chicken operation". I will keep you posted.

I have included some photos of our hen house in progress. Oh yeah, they will be residing in Scooter's fenced in area with him. He told me he was wanting some company and he thought a few hens with all their clucking would be good for him. I think he really just wanted some chickens. For those of you that are new to my blog, Scooter is our 16 year-old pet pot bellied pig. He, by the way, is a great friend and family member.

It goes with out saying, but I will say it anyway, we love our animals.

That is about enough for today.

Until next time...John.