A Growing Mini Farm

This post has been a long time coming! We added something new to the "mini farm". I dearly wish I could go buy acreage somewhere and have the farm I truly want! Some day... some day.

We drove an hour and a half to pick up this little building.  It was well worth the price, though by the time I put gas in my dad's truck (though I use that as a sneaky excuse to help him out) and bought us all lunch, it turned out to be a little expensive.  Still cheaper than the one from Tractor Supply that was smaller and flimsy!

We spent a few days doing some conversion to the dog pen.  They only hang out there when we are outside feeding the rabbits or working in the garden and they continually disobey orders to stay in the yard, so they didn't really need such a large pen.  So we reinforced the bottom with extra wire.  Due to the extreme costs of wire right now, we weren't able to fence over the top like we originally intended.  Right now, a heavy duty tarp is taking care of over-head predators.

Here are the little creatures that we've done so much back-breaking work for over the past few days!  These bantam cochins will hopefully provide us with extra eggs and perhaps even baby chicks! I have quite a color variety and they are very sweet little birds. 

The chickens spent their first night out in the pen locked into their coop.  I a m hoping they will learn that when it gets dark, that's where they need to go.  We shall see, chickens are definitely not the brightest birds.

I spent a bit on this project- the actual chickens were "free" because I had excess and sold them all, which paid for the initial order.  In fact, I pretty much also paid for their first bag of food.  Thankfully We had been planning on doing this last summer, so I didn't get a gift for our anniversary since my gift was going to be getting chickens.  So I can offset some of the costs by saying "oh it's my gift from last year that we never spent the money on".  I will probably also tell Tim it counts as this year's anniversary gift as well. 

Whew, glad I justified those start up costs in my mind! :)

-Kristen