Last Batch of Chickens For The Year

This year I have already hatched out two rounds of chicks.  The first round hatched in late February and began to lay eggs a couple of months ago.  The second round hatched out in the middle of June and have almost reached their full grown size three months later.  In another month, those chicks will be big enough to move into the hen house and will hopefully begin to lay eggs by October or November.  These younger birds should keep me in eggs while the older birds go through their seasonal molt.  Each of these hatches only resulted in a handful of chicks, some of whom were lost to a predator before they got too big, so I decided that I needed to have a few more to make up for this year's losses.

This round I set a dozen eggs for hatching and ended up with four chicks.  It's not the best hatch rate, but for my purposes it is fine.  I don't really want to double the size of my flock each time I hatch eggs, but small increases are manageable. I don't have a broody hen this time, so I will be raising this batch in the "brooder" in my back room.  The brooder is a large aquarium which makes watching baby chicken antics even more entertaining.  The size is a limiting factor and when the chicks are 3-4 weeks old they will be moving outside into my chick tractor.  Here they will continue to grow until they are big enough to put in with the adult birds.

Little by little my flock keeps growing.  I do need to keep in mind that there is a limit to how many chickens I need to have, but I figure that as long as they lay enough eggs to pay for the cost of their feed, then they aren't much of a burden.  They help to clear out the weeds in my yard and they fertilize the soil for me too.  I am trying to put their destructive habits to good use by keeping them in areas that I want to improve.  If my flock grows to be too large I will either sell off extra young laying hens, or cull the older hens when they stop laying eggs for me.  Either way, I will have some time to think about it as these guys grow up.