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Keeping chickens is a new pastime for me this year, although I did keep bantems and breed quail in the UK. This time I have started with just 10 hens and one cockerill. The hens are a local breed to me here in Spain, being the breed 'Catalanas' . They are a medium sized red hen which are good brown egg producers. They produce well for about 2 years. I feed them on 3 scoops of pellets complete food, and one scoop of whole maize per day. In addition they get greens, weeds and their favourite food - well ripe tomatoes in addition daily.
I decided that I would like to start and breed my own hens, so go.JPG)
t an incubator, and suggested to my husband that we visited the local livestock market to purchase a few day old chicks at 50p each for me to practise brooding them, before commiting my own eggs to the incubator.
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t an incubator, and suggested to my husband that we visited the local livestock market to purchase a few day old chicks at 50p each for me to practise brooding them, before commiting my own eggs to the incubator. Arriving at the market which was late setting up, my husband rushed over.JPG)
to the 'chick man' and using the only number he knows in Catalan I think, duly ordered my chicks. When I arrived at the stall I asked how many he had ordered. He told me ' vint' - Twenty. Luckily the 'chick man' only managed to get 18 into the shoe boxes. Two days later my husband left Spain for work in the UK, leaving me with a real chick logistics problem and the spoken promise that not all of them would survive - you have guessed it 3 weeks later I still have all 18 of them, alive, well and happy. The picture above right shows them at 1 day old. The picture on the left , shows them at 3 weeks old. In the 3 weeks they went thorough two stack and store boxes, a rabbit cage and a ferret cage, growing out of each one in a matter of days. As the weather is quite warm here I only needed to use a heat lamp with them for about 4 days at night.
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to the 'chick man' and using the only number he knows in Catalan I think, duly ordered my chicks. When I arrived at the stall I asked how many he had ordered. He told me ' vint' - Twenty. Luckily the 'chick man' only managed to get 18 into the shoe boxes. Two days later my husband left Spain for work in the UK, leaving me with a real chick logistics problem and the spoken promise that not all of them would survive - you have guessed it 3 weeks later I still have all 18 of them, alive, well and happy. The picture above right shows them at 1 day old. The picture on the left , shows them at 3 weeks old. In the 3 weeks they went thorough two stack and store boxes, a rabbit cage and a ferret cage, growing out of each one in a matter of days. As the weather is quite warm here I only needed to use a heat lamp with them for about 4 days at night. Although the chicks are still not fully feathered, and in the UK you would not dream of putting them outside for about 12-14 weeks. The weather here is such that in a draught free environment they do ok outside from about 3 weeks. By 3 weeks the smell and dust is just too much to bear in the house also. Now we have to wait to see how many hens and how many cockerills we have. I will update you on this as soon as I know. The chicks are being fed a high protein chick starter crumb, and are currently eating me out of house and home. I have now also started adding greens and weeds once a day.
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