The road to chickens

When we first decided to order chickens, or chicks, I should say, I had two obsessions: 1. building the coop; 2. reading everything there is about raising chickens from chicks.  

Since we ordered 20 chickens - let me digress a minute.  The reason we ordered 20 is because the total minimum order for shipping is 15, and the minimum per breed is 5.  How do you choose among the hundreds of different breeds available?  Three months ago I thought there was 1 breed of chicken!  When faced with all the choices, I could not narrow it down to more than four breeds.  And who can resist a top hat special?

 

Coop design I found online 

When building a coop, it's important to know how many chickens you need to house.  It is recommended 2-4 ft2 per chicken.  Because we want happy chickens, we are shooting for the higher number, giving our animals plenty of legroom.  That, if my math is correct, means 80 ft2.  Our final coop design will be about 70 ft2, because of a roofing issue, but more on that later.  Suffice it to say, between our friend who is helping us build, our family dynamics, I am relenting on the extra 10 ft2 to save my marriage.  The chickens ultimately will be happier if there are two of us feeding them.

The picture above is what I want my coop to look like.  However, I got the windows free on freecycle and they are a bit larger than those pictured above, so my coop will have different dimensions.  And I want a full size door.  The final coop should be an interesting variation on the above.  I picked this design because it reminded me of a West Indian house.  We lived on the island of St Croix for many years, and the hip roof was always one of my favorite features of the architecture in the Caribbean.

At this point in time, we have marked out the spot for the coop.  Building should commence in a week.

I combed the bookstores, both online and brick/mortar, for books on chickens. The first book was a borrowed one.   

Link to book
I enjoyed the book, and found it helpful, but it wasn't mine.  I love books.  The first purchased book was one that another friend recommended.  Once you start talking about chickens, people that want to own them get every excited for you.  This book is

 Link to book

Barbara Kilarski's book is informative and entertaining.  She is a bit repetitive in places, but no one reads this book cover to cover - you pick it up and concentrate on the part you need to know now.  Reading these books reminds me of when we were waiting for our daughter to be ours.  As we plodded along, painfully waiting for the adoption to be final, I read What to Expect the First Year.  I tried to follow along with the developmentally appropriate parts, but often flipped ahead, or back to get some semblance of sanity as I waited.  The six months took six years, it seemed.  And waiting for these chickens is also hard.  I am impatient.


Then I found the bible of all chicken books:

Link to book


This tome has everything you need to know about chickens and a whole lot more.  I love this book.  But in some ways, it's like owning the Physicians Desk Reference.  There is nothing worse than knowing about problems for me to see problems where they don't exist.  But the book cures my need for detail.  I can study this book every day and still not understand it all, and won't until the chicks arrive and I go through every stage first hand.  I cannot wait.

I will add, on the cover of Damerow's book are three beautiful laced wyandottes.  How did I go from not knowing anything about chickens to being able to identify the breed on the cover of a book?  I am hooked. 
 
Anne at Echo Mountain View Road chickens