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I picked up my 4 rhode island red pullet chicks today:) IDK who's more excited, me or the kids lol. They'll be two weeks old on Tuesday. Can't wait to start getting eggs and adding the manure to the garden, but I know we have a few months before we get any eggs. For right now though they're cute and fun to watch.

Daily bedding changing? really? dang...I didn't think it was that much but that's ok. I used a bunch of shavings from a friend's planer. He was planing down some pine and had a 30gal trash bag full of fresh, untreated pine shavings. Works really well.

I went to the store a few days ago and got the waterer and feeder. Both fed by an upturned mason jar. Got the medicated chick crumbles, heat lamp etc. I feel pretty prepared. I did a good month's worth of research on caring for them from birth to well....end, before I got them. It's running about 90 degrees in their container right now. Gonna back it off 5 degrees every week. Looks like so far a chicks life is eat sleep poop, eat sleep poop, eat sleep, maybe a little wrestling, poop. I can see I'll be changing the water a lot. It took about 2 minutes for one of them to poop in the water.

but I know we have a few months before we get any eggs

More like six months.

If you suspend the waterer and feeder less likely to be pooped in.

Eric

DoubleDogFarm wrote:

but I know we have a few months before we get any eggs

More like six months.

If you suspend the waterer and feeder less likely to be pooped in.

Eric

oh....I read about 4 months of age they start laying. Whatever the case, there's fresh eggs on the way! I can't suspend the feeders, the setup is in the basement for now. But when they go outside I will.

21 weeks if everything is perfect, but I would say at least 5 months.

Eric

What's a pullet?

GardenRN wrote:Daily bedding changing? really? dang...I didn't think it was that much but that's ok. I used a bunch of shavings from a friend's planer. He was planing down some pine and had a 30gal trash bag full of fresh, untreated pine shavings. Works really well.

I went to the store a few days ago and got the waterer and feeder. Both fed by an upturned mason jar. Got the medicated chick crumbles, heat lamp etc. I feel pretty prepared. I did a good month's worth of research on caring for them from birth to well....end, before I got them. It's running about 90 degrees in their container right now. Gonna back it off 5 degrees every week. Looks like so far a chicks life is eat sleep poop, eat sleep poop, eat sleep, maybe a little wrestling, poop. I can see I'll be changing the water a lot. It took about 2 minutes for one of them to poop in the water.

Amazing. I never realized how similar it is to raise pre-weaned kittens and pullets! In college, my BF and I (d*mn, I should've married that man) took in a cat during an Atlanta winter storm and--classic!--three or so weeks later she had a litter of kittens. She didn't seem to know quite what to do with them, and both of us were full-time at Georgia Tech!

So we improvised with a heating pad under a couple of towels in half of a cardboard box. The other half of the box had shredded newspaper for kitten potty functions. Mamma Cat liked the heating pad, kittens liked the heating pad, so they all stayed warm and (relatively) dry and clean. Each night when I got home from school and work, I cleaned off Mamma Cat and her kittens and fed our other cats (Mamma Cat was supposed to have been Cat #3) while BF cooked dinner for the two of us humans. Then I bottle-fed the kittens, just to make sure they had received enough. I repeated this routine a few hours later before going to bed.

As for the

GardenRN wrote:Looks like so far a chicks life is eat sleep poop, eat sleep poop, eat sleep, maybe a little wrestling, poop.

part of it, I can definitely attest to this being the case for puppies and ready-to-come-home kittens.

We adopted our last 8-week-old kittens in 1988; all cats since then have been adult rescues. The pair of kitten littermates wrestled until they dropped in place and then slept soundly until the next round. Awwwww...

Our first dog was an adult rescue; Dog #2 came to us at 16 weeks old, and Vergil (Dog #4) was 22 weeks old but completely untrained. No Sit, Come, Down, Here Boy, Potty Outside, no collar, no leash, no nothin'. So he was definitely sleep poo, sleep pee, pee before food, eat, pee after food, etc. for a l-o-o-o-o-n-g time, since it turned out that he had come to us with multiple internal parasites. Now we have Dog #6, with a known incontinence problem, and he has become known as The Pee Monster. If you think the pullets produce a lot of...ah...fertilizer, just imagine an 80-pound Bernese Mtn. Dog, fully grown! and My first "post-Pee Monster" utility bill will arrive in about 10 days....I'm more than a little nervous. Our utility, Pacific Gas & Electric, charges more per kilowatt hour as you need more power, e.g., for the washing machine cleaning bed pads, towels, and other soiled items.

So enjoy the very small creatures while you can, and hope that they *are* all ladies as well as girls!

Cynthia H.
Sunset Zone 17, USDA Zone 9

DeborahL wrote:What's a pullet?

Just a female chicken (hen) but because they're not yet "hens" when they are babies, they are referred to a pullets.

Oh ! Thanks, Jeff.

DoubleDogFarm wrote:

DeborahL wrote:What's a pullet?

It's when my dad sticks out his index finger and says "Pullet". One should never pull it.

Eric[/quote
lmao "I want you to love me like my dooooooog!"

You can raise your feeder and waterer up with a brick or piece of wood, really easy to do. Make sure it's not too high though, at first. As they grow you can put something higher under the feeder, and water dishes. Makes for MUCH cleaner dishes.

Good Luck with them.