Yellow House Acres

07/02/2022

Yes. We are killing and prepping 13 chickens to be frozen today... In our front yard... Lol 🤷‍♀️💁‍♀️😋

06/20/2022

06/20/2022

Well. We're back at it again! Starting with a set up for laying hens! Sharing everything along the way to inspire others to consider doing the same. Tough times may come but we'll have fresh eggs and eventually adding meat birds as well!
Chickens are not hard. The set up is the hardest part. You need a coop, waterer, feeder, nesting box and preferably wood chips to keep the smell fresh. Check their water and food everyday when you collect eggs! That's it. Add wood chips when needed (which isn't often). You can also feed them your leftovers which they LOVE or let them free range on grass.

06/02/2020

Our brooder Chicks have feathered out enough to move outside. Allie likes this old coop better so we made some quick adjustments to it. Took out the old laying boxes and added the fancy roll-away nesting box. Took out the old falling down perch and added the lean to perch. Then added wood flakes, food and water. Allie's favorites is the solid black chick (beak and all!) And then the white, with fuzzy feet and silver beak. Very beautiful. We don't know all of their heritage, just some quick fertilized eggs we could get a hold of.

05/16/2020

2.5 week old chicks in the brooder shed are all going great! They're even getting their wing and tail feathers already.

05/07/2020

Apparently we're pretty good at hatching. Allie has made a deal with her brother-in-law to hatch off eggs for him. The key for us is to keep the incubator in an area we frequently go in, this one is in the coffee corner of the kitchen right beside the pantry. This makes it so they're being checked on a few times a day to make sure their temperature and humidity is just right. We will candle these eggs in a week to see if they're all fertilized.

05/03/2020

All 12 chicks are doing great and are healthy!

04/30/2020

Check out the array of different colors. They're super smart too. No issues, even though it did get a little cool last night. They all huddled together and stayed under the heat lamp.

04/30/2020

6 more chicks will be going to the brooder at lunch time. A solid black chick is one of them 😍 (check comments for pic)

04/29/2020

First 6 chicks go into the brooder 😍

04/29/2020

Update: 7 chicks hatched!

04/29/2020

We woke up and 2 more had hatched out! We will go live again later today.

04/28/2020

04/28/2020

Two different eggs. Hatching has started! We've been home for weeks but today of all days we have to take a kid to get shots. Hopefully we won't miss this action. Look for some really cool videos this evening! My entire family had never seen a chick hatch until we started doing this with the clear top incubator.

04/10/2020

We've been very busy since September. We've welcomed a brand new babygirl to the family, took out our central HVAC and replaced with an outside wood broiler and adding the geothermal air this weekend.
Tomorrow is Allie's birthday. And since all the COVID 19 stuff she decided to just get some egg laying chickens (backyard bred mixed from our neighbors) naturally we are hatching them ourselves. Today was day one of incubation. If you're interested in starting your own now would be a good time. It takes chickens on average about 8 months from hatching before they start laying eggs.
So we will have more of our videos and pictures coming soon. Also can answer any questions to the best of our ability.

09/03/2019

Yesterday we made a bittersweet move and sold the Delaware Chickens we had left. We needed to get the coops empty to rebuild this winter.
Starting over is not failure. Giving up is failure.

08/16/2019

We have been silent for a while. But we have decided in going through the hatching and raising for meat with the Delaware Chickens they require a little more time to mature to the size we want. What does this mean? We need a more sufficient layout for the birds. Meaning taking apart what we have done with the infrastructure and redoing it. Of course we will take everyone along for the ride ;) so if anyone wants to buy fertilized organic Delaware Chicken eggs, they're $3 a dozen and perfect for incubation or for eating. We will only keep enough chickens to supply us eating eggs and will start to process the rest for our freezer. Starting over is a learning experience. You find what works and make it work better!

06/16/2019

Second batch of the year... Happy Father's day to Chuck! 😊 7 are already hatched out 🤩 here a chick there a chick, pretty much our lives.

05/28/2019

It's time to incubate more eggs for meat chicks! The Delaware chicks are feathered enough to be evicted from the brooder shed and we will be sharing that journey tomorrow.

05/21/2019

4 week old Delaware chicks

05/07/2019

Happiness is when you can finally ditch the last year's Easter bucket for a real egg collector! Yes!

04/29/2019

All 22 chicks are happy and very healthy!

04/27/2019

9 more chicks are ready to go to the brooder! 2 died in the hatching process. And two eggs have not hatched. So this hatch period we had a success rate at 85%. This was the first time we ever hatched our own eggs for meat birds with the Delaware breed.

04/26/2019

Moved the first 13 chicks to the brooder shed.

04/26/2019

13 chicks as of 9:00am!

04/26/2019

6 fully hatched chicks as of 11:45pm. (2 days early!) So... Gross looking. But tomorrow these will be cute little fluff balls 😍

04/26/2019

Our first chick made it completely out!! (Side note: Cora refers to them all as "boys" because she doesn't want to eat the girls 😆)

04/25/2019

About half of them have started hatching

04/25/2019

Y'all are about to see a lot of pictures and videos. It's our favorite day on the farm!
Listen to the first "cheep" 😍🥰

04/25/2019

A few eggs have officially started the hatching process!! Yey!!!!

04/24/2019

Just got the brooder shed ready for the chicks to hatch... Chuck is doing a happy dance... Or happy flossing 😅😁

04/24/2019

4 days left!!! Which means we could have early hatchers in 3 days! 😃

04/15/2019

You can see the baby chick moving inside the egg! How amazing this whole process is. We didn't expect to see this which is why we are very excited about it. The chick is the small darker area. Enjoy!

04/14/2019

This evening we candled the eggs to see if they were fertilized and had viable chicks growing. Of the 27 eggs, 26 were fertilized! First picture is what an unfertilized egg looks like and in the second is what a fertilized egg looks like.
Tomorrow we have a surprise to show what we discovered... 😁

04/09/2019

Changed the Delaware chicken fence to the opposite side of the coop so they can enjoy the grass that started growing. This isn't all of them, some were still inside and didn't want to greet me.

04/08/2019

27 eggs start date was yesterday. It will take 21 days for them to hatch out. Until then we will monitor the humidity and keep it just right for them. In 7 days we will check and see if they're all fertilized.