Some pics from this morning.

I gave my friend 5 hens last week and kept 3 favorites for my daughter. Last night we moved the 3 out of the hen house so we could move the new chicks in. Today my helper help me clean out the old litter put in new shavings and moved the young hens in. Nice fertilizer for my garden!

The first shot is priceless, its the hat, looks like a mask and the board is blocking the rest of her. The chores and related kinds of work is a good thing for kids to be involved in, lays a good foundation down for later in life.

I've thought of keeping some hens for eggs, daily staple for breakfast, but starting from scratch, can a person keep up with it with a full time job? Given whats involved it still seems worth it. Predators, varmints and other vermin are plentiful here, hawks, owls coyote, weasel, fox and even bobcat, though I have not seen one in 10 years, they are around.

Feed costs, winter weather and such, there is a lot to this or so it seems.

Depends on a couple things. Feed costs, if you do organic it is very expensive. If not, doesn't actually cost that much. Also how many would you want? If you get 30 chickens you are going to have 2 years where you have way too many eggs. I think we have around 13 hens right now with 6 new chicks in the garage. most the hens are older and lay a egg every couple of days. Just about right for as many eggs as we eat. We usually get 3-6 new chicks each year, and sometimes meat chicks. Every year the meat chicks and/or roosters will go to the butcher shop. Any way, not really that much to it. When we first started with chickens 6 years ago, we were all concerned about where they would go, who would take care of them, what would we do with eggs and so on. Really did not turn out that hard at all. Built a little chicken coop. Open the coop in the morning and give them food and water. Get the eggs at night and close them up. Of course it differs from place to place. Just make it fit your needs. Build a coop with a fenced roof so now critters can fly in.get yourself 10 chicks and keep them in a box until they get old enogugh to start flying around, then move them to the big coop with a warming lamp.

Chickens are one of the easist anmials to take care of, there's a little involved when there chicks, keep heat on them, if the power goes out you could have a problem ect, I got these ones a little over a month ago, I start them in my lawn shed in a 100 gallon old stock tank from the horse farm that froze and split. I get my feed from Arnold's, 50# bag of chick starter is $12. Cracked corn is $8, and layer last I knew was $10 or $11 for 50#. 50 pounds of chick starter lasted me a month for 15 chicks.
As tracto man said once there adults there's not much to caring for them, fill the waterer fill the hanging feeder stir up the litter, collect the eggs and that's about it. I did let mine out in the morning for the day then lock them for the night over the years, free range makes better tasting eggs, but lost to many to predators. I think the most I had at one time was 35 or 40 hens, I could sell the eggs as fast as they were laid.

you may have solved the problem of what was getting the chickens in an earlier post.......LOL

She is really growing.

Give your little girl another big hug!