The Replacements

I bought some chickens last night. Having only four hens- three of which lay eggs, the fourth is old but still hangs around- I felt like I wasn't getting nearly enough eggs. We like to use our eggs as gifts as well as bartering. I have a friend who cuts my hair and waxes my eyebrows in exchange for fresh eggs. Prior to our raccoon problem, I had nineteen hens which, on a good day, worked out to be about a dozen eggs a day. You wouldn't think we would need that many, but we do go through them. Anyway, I didn't want to start with the baby chicks again because it would take another eight months before I would have hens so I looked to Craigs List instead. Let me tell you- if you buy a baby chicken, they are about $1.25 a piece. I understand that you have to feed them, but honest to God- they don't eat a lot compared to other farm livestock. There were people selling laying hens for $20 a piece and I wanted to email them to tell them exactly how crazy they were. I finally found a girl selling her hens for $4.oo (she's in 4H and gets new hens every year so she had an abundance). I bought ten but ended up with nine because we didn't count right, but I wasn't driving all the way back to Nichols, IA for $4.00.

You wouldn't think it would be a good idea to buy more chickens when we are still dealing with the raccoon problem, but we think we have a good handle on it. We had a friend come out last night and he walked around most of our property scouting trails, paw prints and poop. There are a few hollow trees that are housing families of raccoons, so he set out some traps. We ended up catching a cat last night, but no raccoon. As long as we stay on top of it and close the chickens up early, we should be ok until we get the raccoon colonies taken care of.

One of the trees haboring the serial killers