More chickens...and eggs!

So we've added a few new characters to our little menagerie - 7 more hens.

Some of the new hens on their first day at our farm.

We discovered, for sure, that two of our seven little chicks are roosters. We knew that Donny (formerly Dott) was a rooster. He's been crowing for a month already. But Thistle, even though he looked like a rooster to me, had never crowed. Never, that is, until August 2nd.

Unfortunately, two roosters will need more than five hens. That means we either needed to get rid of one of our roosters, which would break my heart, or find more hens. And, if we got more hens, we needed more coop - and fast!

Lucky for me, I got an email from a nearby farmer needing to sell some of his older, less productive laying hens. Perfect! So I started building onto the coop, adding 10 more square feet of floor space and another next box. And by August 6th we had 7 more hens. All of that was a lot harder than you might think. I generally do not move that fast ;-)

And this was our first egg the next morning.

 Our new, mature hens are too old to lay an egg a day. We're happy with that, though, because we couldn't eat a dozen eggs every day! They are doing just fine and have added a lot of fun and goofy chicken stories to our days as they have gradually found their place with our younger chickens. Finding an egg or 3 everyday when I open the next boxes is nothing short of delightful. I absolutely love having chickens - and I am so glad we could keep both roosters.

Aren't these pretty?! Those bluish eggs are from
the two new (mature) Americauna hens: Heidi and Snow