Tips on Raising Chickens – Part 2 – Baby Chicks
If you want to read Part 1 about choosing a breed & starting off, you can read it here: Tips on Raising Chickens – Part 1
Today we’ll be talking about Raising Baby Chicks.
If you start with eggs or chicks you’ll need to be prepared with a brooding setup. We use a cardboard box (Culver’s & McDonald’s fry boxes are awesome & free!) to keep them in with a heat lamp, water, electrolytes, and food. You can get an expensive setup at Farm & Fleet and on Amazon, but we go the “cheep” route. =)
To start assembling your box, first you have to choose the right box for the amount of chicks you have. Then you lay down paper towels for the floor. It is important to use the paper towels (not newspaper, because it’s slippery) for their first few days to avoid spraddle legs when they are older.
The chicks should have access to water from as soon as you take them out of the incubator. Some people say that the chicks should stay in the incubator for 24 hours after they hatch. I personally don’t agree with that for several reasons: 1 – the chicks that have hatched make it harder for the ones who haven’t by rolling their eggs around. 2 – they dry faster in the brooding box you have set up.
I DO suggest leaving them in the incubator until AFTER they stand up, because when they flop out of the egg, they are tired and just lay on the ground for around an hour. They can get stepped on and injured during this period so it’s imperative that they are separated from the already walking chicks.
Back to the water… You can buy quart jar watering lids like these on Amazon or at Farm & Fleet. They are what we use for our chicks until they are 12 weeks old and ready to join our flock outside. You buy the base for about $3, then put a quart or pint wide mouth glass jar on top.
Electrolytes are basically a vitamin powder that keeps the chicks healthy. They are pretty important. When you move a chick from an incubator to the broody box, you hold the chick & dip it’s beak in the water for a couple seconds, then set the chick on its’ feet. You should do this for ALL the chicks as they go into the box.
We feed the chicks via an egg carton full of chick feed. The chicks’ natural curiosity will teach them how to eat it when they are hungry. The chicks also found out that they fit perfectly and tend to sleep there. =)
About 3 days after they all hatch, you can remove the paper towels and put down pine shavings (chicken bedding). You have to be very careful what you buy bedding-wise, because cedar shavings will kill & so will pine dust. Their bedding will need changed every so often, depending on how often the birds mess it up. We like to use Guardian horse pine shaving bedding because it’s economical & trustworthy.
The used bedding (when you clean it out & get rid of the dirty bedding) makes a very good mulch for around already-established plants in your vegetable garden. =)
More to come soon in Part 3! =)
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