Dude – we got chickens.
When Kevin first proposed getting chickens I thought he was joking. But then when he looked me in the eye and told me he was serious, I thought he had lost his mind.
Chickens? I don’t like animals, why would we get chickens?!
And before you animal lovers sit back, cross your arms and sniff in disdain, I didn’t say I hate animals, I don’t like animals. I don’t like owning them. I don’t like how noisy, smelly and costly they are. I don’t like the work it requires to take care of them. Call me lazy, I won’t argue, but I like animals if someone else owns them.
Kevin wanted to get chickens for a few reasons:
- He wanted to see if he could raise chickens. He wanted the challenge. He’s crazy like that.
- He was curious to see what it would take to raise chickens – what kind of food would they eat? Where would he house them? Could he keep them alive and safe from predators?
- If, (when), the world goes to Hell in a handbasket, was he capable of being self-sufficient enough to provide for his family?
We’ve always been fascinated by people who live off grid. What a life that must be! To actually set yourself up in a house, away from the city, and build an energy infrastructure so you didn’t have to rely on the government for power, sewer, water … to grow your own food so that you didn’t have to rely on artificial preservatives, grocery stores … TAXES.
I watched a few YouTubers that have done exactly that – built a life for themselves completely off grid. It looks like a lot of work, (remember – I’m inherently lazy) and wow – you spend all of your waking moments thinking about where your next meal is going to come from and making sure you have enough basic supplies to live semi-comfortably.
But I could do it. I wouldn’t WANT to do it, but I COULD do it. And I KNOW Kevin could do it. In fact, I think he would THRIVE on it because he’s one of those men who thrive on challenges and has the smarts to just figure it out. He’s one of the best problem solvers I’ve ever met in my life. He’s also very handy and can pretty much figure out how to build, or how to fix, anything.
He’s a Jack-of-all-trades kind of man.
I think anticipating the world to end might have been the biggest deciding factor to actually buying the chickens. In case you haven’t been paying attention to all of these food plants catching fire, the skyrocketing price of food and how the government has started the subliminal, (and perhaps not so subliminal) message of EAT BUGS, THEY ARE GOOD FOR YOU campaign, it feels a little like our government is trying to starve us out of a hostage situation.
Not to mention, the crap – the additives, the preservatives – the government puts in our food and water, (like Fluoride in our water), “for our health” and well, you have to wonder if that is one of the many reasons people are sick and need medications.
(Medications means Big Pharma – ah – definitely a topic for another day).
But, back to the chickens.
He bought six chickens. And Oh. My. Gosh. They were SO CUTE when they were little!!! Cheeping away in the box he set up for them. Sunning themselves under the heat lamp. Kevin watched a lot of YouTube videos and spoke to some people at the Farm/Feed stores about how to care for the chickens. He worked hard to make sure they were well cared for and they thrived.
He did have one, the runt in the group, that wasn’t growing as fast as the others and when he did some research he learned that the runt had “poopy butt.”
And henceforth, that was the chick’s name, by the way.
Sometimes chicks will not be able to drop their poop and it sticks to their butts. As you can imagine, this causes problems and some chickens die if it’s not dealt with. So. Kevin went in and dug the poop out and the chicken not only survived, he/she thrived.
He’s nothing if not committed. Ha!
The chicks stayed in their box for a few weeks (?) and then graduated to a bigger, plastic tub and stayed in the tub for another few weeks (?), (I’m estimating the time here because I didn’t really pay much attention to his “projects”), while he worked to make a “home” for them.
I don’t believe I’ve mentioned that they currently live at the rental house across the street from us. The same house that LeRoy and the boys are currently living in. Not sure how the boys actually felt about co-habituating with chickens, I think they reacted to dad’s “experiment” the same way as me, just shook their heads and moved on with their lives, but that’s where they live now.
The rental house has a fenced in back yard and a shed. (It also has a pool which I worried about – what if the chickens fall in? Can they swim? Will the chemicals morph them into a science fiction character?). So he worked on making the shed into their home. He made a little door for them to go in/out and some ladder thingie for them to roost on when they got larger. He rigged up some sort of contraption for them to get water from, (like a pipe with holes in it), though ultimately I think he figured out it didn’t work that great. But my point is, he built them a home and when they were finally big enough to let out of the plastic tub and run around the backyard, they were living like chicken kings and queens.
We watched them grow up into ugly, red chickens. And then we watched with bated breath to see how many, if any, roosters we may have had because believe it or not, you can’t really tell right away.
I was especially nervous about the roosters because we live within the city limits and we’re not supposed to have roosters within the city limits. Now usually I’m not a big government rule kind of girl but this one I understood – our neighbors would not appreciate waking up every morning to a chorus of crowing roosters, I’m sure.
I didn’t want to wake up to a chorus of crowing roosters.
Kevin started experimenting with what to feed them. He often took our leftovers (a bucket we fondly labeled, the slop bucket), over to the chickens to see if they would eat it. They pretty much ate everything but they didn’t like watermelon or carrots but they LOVED bread.
Chickens after my own heart. Ha!
And of course, they LOVE bugs. In fact, quite by accident, Kevin had a bucket underneath an outside house light when he discovered that the bugs that swarm these lights at night would drop into this bucket, (I guess because they got too close to the light??), and for some reason, couldn’t figure out how to get out so by the next day, the bottom of the bucket was full of live bugs.
Kevin would take that bucket to them, dump the bugs on the ground and the chickens had a bug smorgasbord – they went NUTS for it.
As I said, they live like chicken kings/queens. It’s also a great way to get rid of the bugs.
Fast forward – the chicks grew up and we didn’t have one, two, or even three roosters, we had FIVE. So, five out of the six chicks he bought were roosters which meant we had to get rid of them. He advertised them on Craig’s List and an Asian lady showed up to take them. I’m sure they ended up on someone’s dinner table, but you know what? I don’t want to know … because I watched these things grow up – lalalalala .. moving on.
(Side note: we didn’t truly know the chickens were roosters until one morning Brandon was in the sun room and a few of them crowed. ha!)
So. We were left with one lone red hen. And she is a pretty hen, too. Fat and spoiled. She follows Kevin around whenever he goes into the backyard. It’s pretty cute, actually. But we still wanted eggs, so Kevin went to some lady .. I think, details are hazy, remember, I can’t keep up with his projects, and he bought five more hens. These were teenage hens, grown enough to know they were hens but not mature enough to lay eggs.
Several weeks went by and … no eggs. Kevin wasn’t sure what he was doing wrong. He was feeding them well, they had a nice shed/roost to sleep away from predators, they didn’t seem stressed, they could get in/out of their house any time they pleased … and still, no eggs.
They were officially on probation. No eggs = chicken soup. (Not that I think Kevin could bring himself to kill the chickens to eat. He said he could but …. I know the man, no way!)
Finally, FINALLY, after weeks of waiting, one hen laid an egg. And a light bulb went on over the other hens’ heads and suddenly, we were getting four/five eggs every day. We had so many eggs at one point that we gave them away to Kevin’s parents and my mom. We had a lot of eggs because I couldn’t bring myself to eat any. And trust me, I LOOOOVE eggs. I don’t know, I just … couldn’t do it. It weirded me out. Which I know sounds stupid because, come on, where do you think eggs in the supermarket come from Karen, but it took me several weeks of making sure Kevin didn’t keel over from food poisoning before I cracked the shell, (see what I did there?) and started eating the eggs.
They’re quite tasty, actually. The yolks are a bright yellow, much brighter than the store-bought eggs. I usually eat three eggs on Mondays, Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Yes, on those specific days because I have an eating schedule … more on that in a future post. (I do Intermittent Fasting – STILL).
So now we have a steady stream of farm-fresh eggs from our grandchickens. That’s what we call our chickens because I’m starting to doubt we will actually have any grandchildren the ways things are going now.
Which brings us back to why we wanted our own chickens to begin with.
The coordinated efforts of the US billionaires to decrease our population by tainting our food because of the climate change cult.
STOP.
I can see you rolling your eyes. And maybe I’m completely nuts for going down this rabbit hole but … WHAT IF IT’S TRUE? I mean, think about it, our food is already being injected with all kind of growth hormones, additives, preservatives, CRAP, and animals are being genetically modified in order to produce more, more, MORE food, why is it crazy to think that the elites see an opportunity to inject more nefarious crap? Like, the mRNA from the experimental jab, for example?
You know it’s funny, but when I went to research this topic, I came up with pages and PAGES of “news” sites that debunked the fact that Bill Gates tweeted anything about putting mRNA into our food supply and yet, you see that he did in the above video. Granted, he didn’t specifically mention mRNA but does it really matter? Why do we need our food injected with anything at all?
And it makes me wonder if the cause of a lot of diseases, cancers, aren’t somehow linked to the crap that the government, who care for it’s people and chant like zombies that it’s for the “greater good” aren’t somehow poisoning it’s citizens?
Call me crazy, but I smell rotten meat.
I’m all about getting my news from different sources because let’s face it, all news organizations, whether they are left, right, independent, have agendas. So it’s important to get news from several different sources and make up our own minds, right? But when the media starts censoring these dissenting voices, my BS antenna quivers. What’s the dealio? Why the secrecy? Why the determination to censor people who are simply asking questions and/or seeking answers?
Why indeed?
And then, look what happened to Amos Miller, the Amish farmer who has been fighting the government, FOR YEARS, because he refuses to give his livestock any artificial crap and relies solely on decades of tried and true farming techniques to produce quality food for his family and his community? The government hates people like Amos Miller because they can’t control him. They can’t keep him under their thumbs so they do what any totalitarian government does, they try to shut him down by swatting his property and confiscating his food.
“Today, the Department of Agriculture of the State of Pennsylvania suddenly came, without notice, raided Amos’ farm, and detained everything Amos had in the farm’s freezer.
The state’s rules require advance notice, reasonable time frames for inspections, and a showing of credentials, none of which occurred here. Instead, the state unlawfully obtained a search warrant based on materially false statements in an affidavit by a high-ranking state official in an agency with a known grievance against independent farmers like Amos, and, after the raid and finding no evidence of wrongdoing, then illegally ordered detained every item of food in one of Amos Miller’s coolers, including buffalo meat not even subject to federal regulation. “
That GiveSendGo account is here, if you want to help with legal fees for this Amish farmer.
If they can do this to an Amish farmer, what can they do to YOU?
Miller’s Organic Farm seize really got Wendy Bell fired up, too. I highly recommend following Wendy Bell’s podcast on Rumble. She’s a conservative talk-show host who is not afraid to tell it like it is. She reminds me a lot of a female Rush Limbaugh. It’s also fun to watch what goes on behind the scenes of her podcast. I hope you’ll take a moment to watch her, she says what we’re all thinking and it’s REFRESHING.
Okay, back to our chickens.
These issues? The messing with our food supply, the swatting of innocent farmers just trying to make a living and produce quality, drug-free food, this is why we want to do something – I realize it’s a minor thing, minute really in the grand scheme of things, but we often think, could we figure out how to be self-sufficient in an end-of-the-world scenario?
I’d like to think so, but … probably not. But hey, at least we would have eggs to eat.
Thanks for reading.
Write From Karen 