“I told Mr. Cioffi that me and my family would take all the chicks that hatch this spring.”
Olivia came home from third grade one fall afternoon and announced with great excitement how she’d volunteered to take all the baby chicks that would hatch in the spring when third grade completed their Embryology Unit. She promised the teacher that her parents were fine with taking any and all hatched chicks and that her dad would build a chicken coop!
My husband is fairly unflappable and Olivia’s announcement only sparked his imagination. He’s also an engineer by training and profession, in his mind this would be a fun project: designing and building a chicken coop. Almost immediately, Keith began planning the transformation of the old log cabin (at one time a horse stable) into a new chicken coop.
I was more practical, “Um, I don’t know anything about raising chickens!” I didn’t grow up on a farm; chickens came from the grocery store, as a roaster or cut into neat pieces.
Olivia joined our local 4-H Club.
The boys joined 4-H as well that winter and we began weekly visits to the Grange Hall so the kids could learn about poultry, rocket launching and photography. Early in the spring Keith and the kids worked to turn the old log cabin into a suitable place to house chickens. It was cleverly thought out with new doors, gates, ramps and nesting boxes. And there was a charming yard, all fenced and netted to keep the chickens contained and safe from hawks.
From Olivia’s 4-H studies we learned that newly hatched chicks couldn’t go directly from the incubator, to the school’s warmed (and empty) fish tank, into our new coop. We needed a brooder box. A call to our favorite local appliance shop provided us with two enormous refrigerator boxes. More designing and engineering by Keith provided a VERY large brooder box, that we set up in the basement.
The large brooder box, with two heat lamps, straw bedding, a waterer and plenty of starter feed, was a necessity. The third graders had done an outstanding job tending the eggs while they were in the incubator and 32 eggs successfully hatched, which meant 32 chicks came to live in our basement for 6 weeks, until they got big enough and the temperatures outside got warm enough, to send them out to the log cabin/coop, on the edge of the woods, to begin their lives as country chickens.
