How I Started Raising Chickens.

One day my mom was bringing me to a friends house. After she dropped me off, she saw some people on the side of the road selling chicks and bought 6 of them. I don't really know why she bought them, and I'm not sure she knew why either, but I am glad she got them. At the time, we had a litter of kittens too, so we had fun watching them play with each other.

We didn't have a home for them so we just turned a crate upside down in our garage to keep them in and keep other animals out. 

We read on the internet that they need a light when they are young, so we put a lamp inside their cage and that kept them warm. It was Spring 2009. I had a friend over and we decided to make a cage for them. We got some wood and built it. Then we stapled the chicken wire around it and put a tarp over the top for a roof.
When they were weeks old, 3 of them died one day at a time, and we weren't sure what was wrong. We just kept on doing what we were doing and raised three healthy little chickens! We moved them out into the yard next to the garage so they could peck at the grass for the first time. They loved it! A few months went by and I knew that their tarp covered cage wasn't a "proper living" place for them. So I thought of what I could do to build them a home. We had an old playhouse that we didn't use anymore and I took some measurements for wood and chicken wire. After a few weeks I had reconstructed a playhouse into a chicken coop!

I sawed the slide and the wooden ladder off the front and covered two walls with plywood and the other two sides with chicken wire. I hadn't moved them into their new home yet because I had just built it. I planned on putting them in their new coop the next day, but the next morning when I went to feed them, they were all killed. I was sad, but that is part of the whole experience. A year went by and my mom came home with 6 chirping chicks and I was ready to start over again.

I brought the old cage, that my friend and I built, into the garage and put that same lamp in the cage and fed them, watered them and played with them for months.

It was the beginning of summer and time for them to go outside! I moved their cage into the grass and they lived their for two weeks and one of them went missing. Later that day, one of my cats was laying out in the field eating something with feathers. It didn't affect me like it did the first time, but I just kept on raising them. When they got old enough to tell their gender, We realized that we had bought 4 roosters, and only had one hen. We gave away three roosters, and kept one of them to keep the hen company.

I moved them into their new home which I had built the previous year. I worked on it some more by sawing some planks upstairs, using the old ladder as a place to roost and a way for them to get to the top and back down, and to secure it from any future attacks. I had them for the longest time, but just recently some stray dogs broke through the wire and killed the rooster, but he protected the rest of the family because they were all upstairs in the top part of their new coop.

Before the dog attack, we bought two chickens from a guy on craigslist. We had no clue what they were or what gender they were. I thought that they were Bantam hens. My mom thought there was a Bantam rooster and a hen. We still to this day do not know what they are! Bantams are supposed to be small, but they are both younger than my first hen and bigger!