Darn Tootin'

The chicken coop is done and our little ladies (and a few little men too, we suspect) are living happily out in the yard.  We've been learning all we can about chicken farming and are reading a lot of interesting things online these days.  Did you know that a hen's eggs will be the same color as her ear lobes?  Did you know that as soon as we learned this we had to Google: "where are a chicken's ear lobes?"  Oh yeah, they have ears, and lobes too.  The other night I found myself reading  a blog post titled "Wattle I do for love."

When Dustin builds something he builds it right.  He researched chicken coops for a month before breaking ground on this project.  The end result is an attractive, safe, highly functional home for our new pets.  The door over the nesting boxes opens so it will be easy to retrieve the eggs every day.  

Kenzie helped paint it, and she actually painted quite a bit.  We thought she'd lose interest after a few minutes but she ended up painting both of the removable sides (and parts of her body).

This is her posing-for-a-picture smile.

It wasn't that hot, but she was working hard.

Caught red-handed.

Now that they are accustomed to where their home is we can let them loose in the yard.  We did this hesitantly the first time but countless websites assured us that when dusk settles they will find their way home to roost.  Guess what?  It's true.  All ten were perched in the coop by 7:30 so we could lock them safely in their home.  It's almost too easy.

Kenzie could watch them all day long (and so could Dustin and I if we didn't have other pressing things to do, like, say, work and keep house and, well,  be normal).    We hope that they will start laying eggs by mid June.  More pictures and videos to come.