Shari's Gone Country

Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Are there chickens or eggs yet?

That's all we're hearing from Cindy's Mom, who just can't wait to have truly "farm fresh" eggs and chicken.

We have the "perfect spot" for an 8x8 foot coop, a concrete pad that has both water and electric (currently not functional) to it.

The coop is being built on the pad to the right, and the outside runs will be towards the tree and to the right (towards the sheep pen).

Bev and Cindy both have considerable construction experience, so aside from allowing me to pound nails into the plywood, I was "the mule"... You know, carry this, hand me that, wait for me... Geez, I got tired just watching them work.

All Mom will have to do is come out the back door, cross the driveway and walk about 60 feet to get to her chickens.

We'll have a "peaked" roof... slope is 4:1, so not real steep, but enough to handle the snow load. This next weekend, we'll have the roof on, and be ready to order our chicks.

Mom wants eggs. We figure as long as we're going to have a hen or two for her, we might just as well have some brown eggs to sell. Total chicks on our list is 50. That should yield about 20 hens. Another neighbor aka "The Egg Lady" told us she has 15 hens and is getting about a dozen eggs a day.

I'd be thrilled if Bev could take orders in St. George or even Cindy taking orders in Enterprise to sell 10 doz eggs a week. With the price of eggs rising... and brown eggs on the high end, we could pretty much cover our costs and make a little profit.

We got the nest boxes installed (full of tools right now), the door, and a few of the rafters up before the wind got too bad. Time out for a couple days as the weather is pretty "iffy"... forecast for better than 30 mph wind and thunderstorms.