My friends over at the Surf Club thought the landlord was selling the house, so with 3 month as our deadline we decided to get a couple of egg playing chickens for the summer. (This was back in July.) We had to go 25 miles inland to get them from a sweet old lady who raised them as a hobby in her old age.
Things we didn't think about at the time. 1) How to construct an adequate suitable coop for the hens. 2) Change in environment. 3) Amount they poop.
None of the hens laid for the first month, except the little red bantam who became broody. (Then it was months before the Buff Orpington and the Maran began laying.) She wasn't socializing well with the bigger hens so I got her an assorted bantam cochin hatching eggs and allowed her to go through with her cycle. Within a couple weeks she became a proud mother of four assorted. One of them turned out to be a rooster, then dinner. But the rest are still around. They havn't laid yet but the Little Red Mama's started laying again.
The Americanas (Shanti Clara and Lady Gray), Buff Orpington (Buffy), and the Black Cuckoo Maran's (Aunt Jemima) are all laying now. We get 4-5 eggs a day 5-7days a week and we expect the little hens will start laying soon.
The two small light ones in the back are Little Red Mama's, three dark brown ones are Aunt Jemima's (they should be a chocolate brown, but I didn't get the hen from a reputable breeder), light brown in front is Buffy's, the funny shaped long pale green one in the back is Lady Gray's first egg, and the other two are Shanti's.
The Coop 3.0. It took several trys, but they seem to be liking their new housing.
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