A chick by any other name is still cute as hell...

If someone told me 20 years ago that one day I'd gladly be spending the first long weekend of the summer huddled over a bunch of incubating eggs, I would have punched him. However, that is exactly what happened, and that Bizzarro like change of events began not too long ago... (cue flashback special effects)

One of the things D and I discussed when we first decided to make the jump to the green acres lifestyle was raising chickens. As always I thought big, at that point in time I assured her it would be about 10 chickens in a small coop. A general rule I've learned in our short marriage is this: In any marriage, to psych your significant other up for something, you half it at first and then let it grow organically. So once the seed was planted for that one, I set to reading my plethora of books on the subject and joined a couple websites.

1. A great one for our geographic location was Poultry Swap Ontario 
2. A very informative yet USA based site Backyard Chickens     

 As usual it's mostly about the message boards whose members are very educated and more than helpful with information, even if it has been asked a hundred times already. The Backyard Chickens site even has a little education section for all the basics. Priceless.

The original plan was to purchase a few day old chicks from a couple places and get them into a brooder, then out to a mansion like coop to start laying. At some point along the road, about 2 months ago, I had the eureka to hatch our own eggs. As mentioned in the last episode, it was about price/chick, health of the chick, the variety available, and of course the experience. If we are doing this, let jump in with both feet. Little did I know...

Step 1 - A Cook is limited by his gear!

Incubator hard at work

So the first step is to buy an incubator. Gotta have some place to cook these little devils and get them out into the world. There are various places to buy them and various suppliers of anything from a desktop model to one the size of a fridge which does 1000 eggs. We settled on the Hovabator basic model from a guy on Ebay. (A family member was visiting the USA so we had it shipped there and they brought it back. Saving shipping and customs) It holds up to 42 eggs and you can get some basic extras for it to make life a lot easier. These extras made all the difference so if you are planning on giving the egg hatching a try, trust me on this one.

The entire package cost us about 120$ US and included:

• The Incubator - Hovabator basic model, mostly Styrofoam and a footprint equal to a laptop.  
• A Digital Thermometer/Hydrometer: Very important extra because the included thermometer is about as lame as extras get, and the moisture meter aspect is key for maintaining humidity at different levels.  
• An Egg Turner: The most import extra you can get for this endeavour. Normally, for those who are crazy, you literally have to turn the egg over 3 times a day for 18 days to ensure the eggs hatch properly. Something to do with preventing sticking to the egg. They have a whole system of marking each side with an X or O and that keeps track. The egg turner does it all for you. Put the eggs in small end down, plug it in and walk away...  
•  A Computer Fan: You hard wire and attach it inside the incubator to keep air circulating. (takes 5 mins) Keeps temps even and help to dry off the chicks once they hatch.

This combination is all we needed to turn our place into a hatchapalooza festival. Oh, but first we have to get the eggs...

Step 2 -  Gotta fill'em with something...

If you visit either of the aforementioned websites they have sales areas for people to buy and sell various types of poultry: eggs, chicks, full grown layers/roosters, ducks and even geese or pheasants. It was here while poking around I found out about a 'Fir and Fowl' swap happening out in ultra-farmland a couple weeks from then. I would have been able to get eggs (craigslist, chicken sites) here and there from different places, with me driving back and forth or, I could head to one place and get a large variety from all over the area.

At first the idea was to just head out to this little town and probably see like 15 or 20 pickup trucks with chickens at various stages. Like a mini farmer tailgate party where they sell live chickens not cooked ones. Anyway, before heading up I thought it might be a good move to have some sales prebooked to pick up there. I sent messages to a few people on the site and had it set to hold them for us to pickup. It was a very nice thing for these people to do considering I may not show/be lost or any number of things which would leave them with eggs unsold.

Again, things got a little out of hand and I ended up pre-booking basically all the free spots I had eggs for. Actually, we were only going for about 10 chickens so we are way over the top now. I justified it to myself by thinking, 'ok, usually they say you get about 75-80% hatch rate (less for us being newbies) and from that, if we're lucky, 50% of those will be roosters (which you only need 1 or 2 of). So once everything washes out we'll maybe lose a couple to the circle of life and we'll be just about right. We also can trade/sell and/or eat any extras we have. The problem being, it'll stop us being able to pickup new eggs there unless I wanted to try to sell or toss any overage. In the end I was glad I did pre-book.    

I started reading that people begin poking around at like 4 am at this swap with flashlights. These are the hardcore chicken heads who are coming for something specific or rare. As it turned out the place for the swap was 2 hours from our house, so there is no way I was making it that early and frankly we decided that I should go solo, which I am also just as happy to do. I'll be the first to admit I'm a bad person to shop with and finding/meandering around a place I've never been to, could frustrate anyone with me. I'll circle a place a couple times just to take it all in, and then zig zag back and forth getting the best of what we need. Sometimes changing my mind and going back for something else. Even worse I'll just stand at a busy table for a while, looking at the merchandise and people watching.

Poultry Flea Market / DNA Boggle capital

So I leave at 6 am and most people I'm meeting are expecting me about 9. I've got time to get lost or doddle if I want, scope out the competition and see if anything else of higher interest is available. The ride is uneventful and when I pull into the small town the swap was easy to find. When I say it was packed to the brim with people and trucks, it would be an understatement. It was a standard football field and racetrack at a high school, with trucks of all sizes side by side around both sides of the track, plus any other place where a truck could park, there was one. Even the parking lots were full with sellers. I had to park almost a km away, and was happy I wasn't getting anything big. Carrying a couple boxes of fragile eggs was bad enough.

They sold every kind of feathered foul you can think of, eggs and live ones. Plus they had snakes, pigs, puppies and I think I saw a llama. Few chicken waterers and accessories here and there, nothing mind shattering. However there were tons of people, and in some spots it was shoulder to shoulder. In the middle of nowhere? This swap probably quadruples the towns population for a few hours. The point of this story is that all the good eggs we would want to get our hands on were nowhere to be found. Many signs with crossed out listings peppered the lane ways and by 9am the stuff was basically gonzo. Hence why we read people are snooping around at 4 am.

Regardless, we had our sales set up and the transactions went smooth enough. One person was a sweet woman from the far south west and she traded me a dozen eggs for some seeds I had brought with me. (Thanks seed swap) The only negative I would take with me was one of the sellers eggs were a little different colour than his listing pics, and his eggs were a little dated. Not to mention they were expensive. As a rule you want your eggs to be 7 days or younger for maximum hatching. A couple of his were hitting the 7 day mark but I didn't notice it till I got back home. (he penciled the date they were laid on them) I ended up getting out of there about 12:30 with 48 eggs in hand and a big bag of pine shavings I know we'd need at some point. I could have gotten more things but this trip was as much recon as anything.

To be continued....