Spring is here... Sort of...

It's the last day of march, technically spring has been here for a week and a half, but you wouldn't really know it by looking at the yard. We're looking at a late spring this year, compared to last year when we had the garden worked and were planting by mid April. As it is now, there's still a foot of snow on the garden, and I haven't let the layer chickens out of the coop yet.

However, that doesn't mean that there isn't work to do. As much as I'd have liked to plant potatoes on Good Friday, it just wasn't happening. So, instead, we picked up our first 11 broiler chickens.

Because of the late spring, the chickens at the local farm supply store haven't been selling. That's a win for us, because we were able to buy two week old Cornish Cross chicks and save two weeks of feed. We brought the chicks home and turned them loose in a makeshift brooder that they'll live in until they're 3-4 weeks old, or until the weather is nice enough to move them into a chicken tractor in the yard. Our chicken brooder is very simple. It's a 6x6 foot square enclosure, 2 feet high, made out of scrap wood and lined with straw. I put this in the corner of an outbuilding with a heat lamp, waterer and chick feeder. It took less than an hour to prepare the whole thing. If we didn't already have all this stuff laying around, we still could have bought everything to make the brooder for less than $50 and been able to use it year after year. A plastic waterer runs about $12, a chick feeder is about $5, a heat lamp and bulb is less than $20, a straw bale is about $5, and if you don't want to buy plywood to build the walls of the brooder, you can duct tape cardboard together and then just throw it in the compost pile (minus the tape) when you're done with it. Empty boxes can be had free from many places.

When these chickens are large enough to move outside into the chicken tractor, we'll buy another 11 chicks to put in the brooder. That way we'll have 22 chickens to butcher and freeze for the year, but we'll do them in two batches so we don't have to spend a backbreaking day doing them all at once. It also allows us to use a smaller brooder and chicken tractor than we would need otherwise, and because we have a continual supply of kitchen scraps and garden scraps to add to their feed, we're making better use of that by raising butcher chickens in two batches. And, if time allows, we can do another small batch even later in the year. Since we don't have to build a large coop or special enclosure for the broiler chickens, we can disassemble the brooder and store it away when we're done, and the chicken tractor will become the home for our six laying chickens for the rest of the summer, after the butcher chickens are out of it.

Now, the disclaimer. We've never raised broiler chickens before. We've had laying hens for some time now, but this is a new experiment for us. We have some very good advice from my mom and my brother, both of whom have raised large numbers of butcher chickens before, but we'll have to find our own way through this, and hopefully learn what works best for us along the way.