🐓 Order chickens online they said. It will be fun they said… 🐓

So we did.

We went to craigslist and ordered six starter pullet hens 🐓 of two different varieties. Three Light Brahmas and three Barred Rock hens. We got our coop cleared of wasp, and set up an electric fence around the perimeter of the coop with plenty of space for the hens to graze. Below is a picture of the setup before the hens arrived. In my opinion our setup was pretty good, and we were confident in ordering some chickens and harvesting some eggs 🥚- unfortunately things don’t always go according to plan and we made a few costly mistakes.

We picked up the chickens from a local farmer and met them about an hour away from our property. The chickens came in boxes, two to a box 📦 and we loaded them into our truck and headed home to release them into their new home 🏠. I was incredibly excited about this and our excitement lead us to make our first critical mistake.

After researching later, it is critical to release the chickens in a certain way. If handling new chickens, it is critical to keep them in their boxes and put the boxes inside the coop. From here, open the boxes inside the coop and close the door to the coop. It is recommended to keep the chickens in the coop for the first 24 hours so they can get comfortable and feel safe.

This is not what we did… 🐔

Instead, we placed the boxes outside the coop and ripped open the tops and grabbed the chickens and released them into the small fenced in field. Not only did this put a tremendous amount of stress on the hens, but it caused one of them to continually break through the electric fence. Our electric fence that we worked so hard on was completely useless against the chickens. The chicken would just stick it’s head through the netting and wiggle its way out. 🐔

We spent the entire afternoon trying to capture the chicken who continued to escape and we worked even harder trying to get all of the chickens into the coop for bedtime. The entire ordeal could have been easily avoided if we would have done more research online and I hope this story helps anyone looking to purchase hens for the first time.

Once we finally got all of the hens into their coop, we had to build a new fence around the coop to keep the chickens in. We did this by using T Post and Hog Fencing 🤺 and built a simple gate to go in and out from. This fence served as our temporary fencing until we were able to put in a more permanent solution to give the chickens more room to graze.

After all the work was done ✅it was time to enjoy our chickens and to our surprise, we received our first egg!!!