Yes or Roo?

Seems like lately, everyday on this farm consists of me trying to figure out if this chicken or that chick is a pullet or a cockerel. For you non-chicken owners, that's a girl or a boy.

I hatched my own eggs, set Super Bowl Sunday (GO PACKERS) after losing my whole flock of 20 to something...under suspicious circumstances but only my Roo, Big Daddy survived. Under the worst of circumstances, I grabbed eggs out of the coop and the fridge and to my surprise, I hatched 14 of 22!

Here I am 4 months later, still trying to figure out the sex of a few of them. The chickens I'm having trouble with are from the Easter Egger breed and these can be hard to sex due to a small comb (the thing on top of their heads) and wattles (those things that hang down below their beak). So I decide I won't have enough girls to give me eggs (we sell them and our customers are missing their fresh eggs) so I grab 9 "girls" from the feed store. They only identify them as "brown egg laying chickens"...now that should relate to "girls" right? Since only the girls lay eggs....well, not if you're on a roll with roo's!

Three of these "girls" go to our grandkids (my son picked a chick from the straight run and has the same luck as his mom and got a roo. I brooded two for his family and one for my daughter's family. She wanted to add an Australorp to her 4..vocal girls). One, I'm sure is a cockerel because he has a very large and red comb that popped up at 3 weeks...now, I have another suspect.......and my husband wonders why I spend so much time just sitting and watching the chickens.....and drinking so much wine!

Here's a pictures of the two new buggers....so out of 9 pullets (after giving 3 to the grandkids), I'll be lucky to get 4.....to add to my maybe 5-6 from my own hatch....the continuing saga of Yes or Roo?

My First Day

Hi, it's my first day for this blog about our farm High 'N Dry Farm. I've created this blog to share farm life and help and encourage others to create their own farming experience.

My husband of 32 years (today!) and I have 3 horses, 16 chickens, 2 dogs and a barn cat. We use to have two goats but they were city goats and preferred the alfalfa the horses were getting over the weed we got them to eat so we rehomed them to a really nice farm where they can have babies and be a part of their petting zoo. As much as the horses seem to dislike them, they did miss them when they left a week ago. Go figure!

We also have two grown kids who are married to people we love like they're our own kids! They've given us 5 grandkids who we are over the moon about! They make us laugh out loud every day!

We called our farm High 'N Dry Farm because we are high on a bluff over looking beautiful Lake Oroville's West Branch, it's pretty dry here in the summers (usually, but not this year) and for the usual reason why people say they're high 'n dry!

I will be sharing the day in and day out antics, trials and tribulatons of life on our farm, from the chickens to our beautiful veggie garden!

Pam