The Poultry Pen

All our poultry get to free-range during the daylight hours. The bugs, grass, weeds, fruits and seeds they forage, in addition to the quality non-medicated commercial feed and scratch grains they have access to all the time, makes for some very happy and healthy birds! 

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The Poultry Pen has gone through a major upgrade the past few months, both in infrastructure and bird numbers. The ‘Big Coop’ got a new white metal roof. This coop is home to our pair of French Toulouse Geese (Louise and Antoinette), and the dozen Blue Swedish Ducks, eight of whom we hatched this spring from our own stock. We have a limited regular supply of duck eggs available for sale now, and that number will gradually be increasing over the next month or two as the youngest ducks start laying. The geese won’t start laying again until Spring 2023. Both duck and geese eggs are richer and more viscous than chicken eggs; wonderful for baking, as well as eating on their own, or in any dish you’d use a chicken egg.

 

We added a second small coop (for a total of three coops) and totally enclosed run that is dedicated purely to our growing Silkie Bantam flock. These friendly little birds lay the cutest small cream-colored eggs. We have a mixed pen of buff, splash, blue and black. Once the buffs reach maturity, we are willing to isolate them for breeding purposes, selling both hatching eggs and chicks.

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We had unfortunately lost several mature birds to racoons earlier in 2022. It took some patience and creativity, but we finally won that battle, and so added 24 dual purpose hen chicks to the full-size chicken flock in July 2022. They started laying over the winter, greatly increasing our chicken egg production, lying a variety of brown, blue, white and green large eggs. Dual-purpose birds are both decent egg producers, but also good meat birds. We will be selling their eggs for eating and hatching, and hatching chicks to grow for meat. Our chicken breeds include: Lavender Ameraucana Cockerels. Hens; Lavender and Blue Ameraucana, Barred Plymouth Rock, Penciled Plymouth Rock, Golden Laced Wyandotte, Welsummer,  Partridge Olive Egger, Golden Cuckoo Maran, Exchequer Leghorn, Speckled Sussex, Cream Legbar and Austrlorp. 

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Finally, we cross bred our Lavender Ameraucana Cockerel (blue egg layer genes) with some of our Silkie Bantam Hens (cream egg layers) to produce a hybrid hen that lays small blue eggs - I've yet to see those anywhere else!

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In the Summer of 2023, we added quail to the mix of birds. Having originally started outliving in their specialized cages in the house, their new insulated room in the Polebarn will be complete the end of September. Quail eggs are super nutrient rich and their meat, while small, makes a delicious special treat. Eggs sell for $3 a dozen.

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You can place orders for eggs and eventually poultry meat via this website.