Got Chickens?

We finally have chickens!

Well, we have a young hen and rooster to be more specific.  We've been looking everywhere for chicks for laying eggs, but only found chicks for meat.  So, my good friend, Shirley (who's husband raises sheep next to our house), brought me to a friend that raises chickens for eggs and meat.  She was willing to sell us one of her young roosters and a young hen this past weekend.  This specific kind of hen will lay eggs AND warm them to produce chicks.  We don't really know what breed this guys are... probably just Costa Rican mutt chickens  :o)

So, I know the general rule is "never name your chickens", but we decided to go ahead and named the rooster... Fuego.  Which means "fire" in Spanish and we gave him that name because it looks like his head is on fire.  Then my mom decided to name the hen... Moka.  So, there you go!  You have officially met our rooster and hen  :o)

The guys live in this sweet coop that my dad build a couple weeks ago.  It is a very rustic, frugal chicken coop and it looks SO Costa Rican!  We spend less than $35 for everything.  Pretty sweet, huh?  Especially because my dad read on a website that is it average to spend about $200 to build a decent coop.  My dad is really good about being frugal when building things, especially now that we are missionaries.

See the little box on the right side of the coop?  That's where the hens will lay their eggs.  There's 3 sections in there for them to lay their eggs.  We are doing the deep litter method and we made a simple chicken feeder and waterer using 1 gallon buckets.  We had to raise them up a little with some wood to keep the guys from getting shavings in their food and water.  Today we went out and bought stuff to make our own whole grain feed.  We did our best to find what we could and thankfully we got a majority of what we needed.  The guys LOVED it and later I brought out a bowl of my kraut for them to try.  At first they didn't know what it was, but they were brave enough to try it and enjoyed it (especially Fuego).  Our next project is to create a little maggot farm for our guys... Oh yeah, you read it right!  I don't think we'll be using animal carcasses, but we'll use old food waste.  Can't wait to do it... Maggots is free chicken feed!  I LOVE free stuff, who doesn't?

I'll post better pictures later.  I was taking pictures right at the beginning of a rain storm.  So the lighting wasn't the greatest and I was holding a umbrella with one hand while trying to take pictures with the other hand.  Get the picture?