We keep a small range of chickens. We have, black silkies, white silkies, gold buff orpingtons, pekin bantams, hybrid layers and a few other odd birds about.

All of these birds are pretty little birds and most are bantams, except for the hybrid layers. They lay small white eggs and about 250 a year, except for the hybrids which lay the normal egg which you can buy at Tescos.

Chickens will live off a simple layers mash or pellets. When they are being reared they eat chick crumbs for the first 5 or 6 weeks and then growers pellets until about 15-17 weeks of age when they can begin eating layers pellets. They shouldn't eat layers pellets before this becasue it is high in calcum and that isn't good for young chicks. A chicken should lay its first egg at about 17 weeks old.

Here are some white silkies and an odd bantam we have!
 Here are some of the hybrid layers we have, we have about 500 of these:
 Here is a black silkie chick hatching in an incubator, and below is it drying off after hatching and then it is in the brooder where it will be reared for 5 or 6 weeks before it will be moved outside when it has its adult waterproof feathers.
 The above have been hatched and reared artificially using an incubator and a brooder. Below are some chicks that have been hatched naturally under a broody hen:

 (This page was last updated on 06/02/09)

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