There’s too much to write about in a single blog post, so this is a pre-post post.

First, everybody’s been asking us how our dogs are doing with the chicks. The answer is…good, we think. They haven’t shown aggression, or in Cora’s case, much interest at all. But we’ll never trust them with the chicks, all the same. There’s that predator-prey relationship, and all that.

If anything, we think the dogs are only distressed because they’re getting less attention from us. They’ve both been kind of needy.

We’ve been cautiously letting them approach the poultry pets.

Baobao is quite tense around the chicks. Maybe because he’s a wild dog with a strong prey drive. Maybe because I growl when he gets too close or stares too long.

Cora sniffs around the chicks (in their new brooder), but stays calm.

Just to make sure the dogs still feel loved, Rachel made them a tasty tray of garden goodies, like a charcuterie plate.

Don’t worry, Rachel kept the biggest tomato in the garden for herself.

Meanwhile, for months we’ve been doing other chick-related work around the house and yard. It kind of reached fever pitch this week.

Turns out much of the stuff I was doing for our garden already, pre-chicken, benefits them directly. So I’ll include them here.

Many of the plants we grew this spring and summer, like sunflowers, herbs, calendula, and our clover ‘meadow’ will be tasty treats for the chicks. We’ve dried and stored many of these treasures.

Once we decided to get chickens, we planted additional shrubs in the meadow. Rachel chose raspberries, blackberries, and several kinds of blueberries.

We always grow lots of herbs in the garden because they’re easy, beautiful, and smell and taste terrific. This year we have an extra use for them. We’ve been picking and drying lots of herbs for the chicks to nibble on. They love lavender and mint, especially. I throw a bunch in the brooder every day. When the chicks move out to the yard in a couple of weeks, the herbs will keep their coop smelling nice.

Then there’s chicken yard projects.

One of the first things we did upon committing to the Chicken Dream was to buy and assemble a backyard coop. We had looked into building a coop from scratch, using redwood from Rachel’s outgrown playhouse. However, that just wasn’t in our bandwidth. Buying an easy-to-assemble coop from The Chicken Coop Company was a much better choice for us.

We’ve stained the coop to protect it from rain. I still need to predator-proof it from below using hardware cloth, because we’ve got raccoons, skunks, and foxes in our neighborhood. Nobody’s going to get to our chickies while they’re sleeping!

Next, because chickens are prolific poopers (as far as gardeners are concerned, this is one of their superpowers), we needed a better home composting system to take full advantage of that garden gold.

My first construction project in a long, long time, that took a long, long time to finish: a double compost bin. The frame is mostly out of redwood from the playhouse, the rest scrap wood from free pallets. Most of the hardware was recycled. The sides and tops are hinged for easy dumping and harvesting.

Here I am unfurling some hardware cloth to rat-proof the compost bin. It’s nasty to work with! Got poked and scratched everywhere.

We’ve already started using the compost bin. Now that autumn is here, we’ll soon have a lot of “browns” (dry leaves) to layer with our “greens” (kitchen scraps and fresh stuff), all mixed in with the, er, valuable offerings from our chicks.

Next project, fencing the chicken meadow. We needed a way to keep chickens in and dogs out.

After spending money on a coop, I couldn’t bear the thought of also paying for a real fence. Instead, I constructed a crude but effective one for minimal bucks.

First, the posts were stained and set in concrete.

Then we secured 6-foot livestock wire to the posts. Apparently, chickens can fly. Three of ours will likely be too heavy to get far off the ground, but the little bantam, Beyoncé, has already shown herself to be a great flyer and escape artist.

Last, a gate for the chicken yard. Thanks to my DIY-handy neighbors Leslie and Jim, I had plenty of scrap wood to add to my stash, making for a unique but functional and sturdy gate.

While all this was going on, our chicks outgrew their brooder box. I could see they were getting restless. Online, I saw the idea for repurposing a (human) baby’s crib as a larger brooder.

Freecycle to the rescue! A neighbor was trying to get rid of her chewed-up old crib (a teething baby, apparently). I hauled it home, assembled it, and lined the sides with hardware cloth. A thick layer of pine shavings and a simple lid created a cozy new home for the chicks.

Lastly, on Saturday we attended an inspiring community event at a local urban farm store in Berkeley.

Biofuel Oasis started as a biofuel station (and still is), but now hosts educational events and sells supplies for homesteading activities like gardening, chicken- or beekeeping, and fermenting foods.

We got fun supplies like beeswax (for making waxed cloth, an alternative to plastic wrap) and kefir grains to start our own culture. Also, we got beautifully colorful homegrown eggs!

Other fun activities: a pumpkin weighing contest, honey extracting, and treats like goat’s milk-caramel apples.

We all really enjoyed making dolls out of produce.

One of the main people at Biofuel Oasis, Novella Carpenter, is also the author of Farm City: the Education of an Urban Farmer. That book really inspired me. Joe made me talk to her though I was shy about fan-girling. She was super cool.

That’s all for now. Stay tuned for an actual post about the chicks!

The chicks spent their third week learning all about the great outdoors.

After living their entire lives in a strict temperature-controlled indoor environment, we decided that it was time to give them some fresh air and much-needed fun time, chicken-style.

This spring, I had planted a mini-meadow of sorts in what is now intended to be the chicken yard.

We set up the play pen and let them peck around and poop with abandon.

At first they weren’t sure quite what to make of their new environs. They sat on us quite a lot.

Soon, they felt secure enough to explore. I think you can see in the photos how much happier they are out of doors.

Beyoncé was all smiles. Actually, she makes all sorts of funny faces in general. She’s our most expressive chick.

Ultra close up.

She’s not panting, just sitting with her mouth open. Waiting for a bug to come by, perhaps?

The young’uns are pretty flexible.

She’s very dinosaurish.

I set the camera up at their level and got some cute shots. There were many, many moons.

We’ve noticed this week that our darker girls, Beyoncé and Glory, are getting feathers much faster than their sisters. The two blondies are still just working on their wings. They have little shoulder blade tuft is that we call angel wings.

They are all starting to develop tiny combs.

Glory looks fuzzy here, but you’ll see in the following photos that her body feathers are really coming in. She’s entering that awkward teenage phase.

After a few days, we expanded their world to our front yard. They were right at home in my vegetable beds. Nobody seemed interested in the actual vegetables, but having all those plants to hide under and straw to peck at made their fuzzy little hearts quite content.

So all in all, it was a wonderful week of exploration for these girls.

Honey’s been getting up early in the morning with me these days. I think that makes her extra tired in the afternoons.

What’s better than an afternoon nap in the meadow?

An afternoon nap in the meadow with your sister, that’s what.

Happy three weeks old to our chickies!

Chickies are two weeks old today! They’ve started taking short flights in the cage (and in the house), and lose a little more fuzziness every day.

We’ve been tracking their growth on a food scale.

For instance, here’s our tiny bantam, Beyoncé, getting weighed on successive days.

Three days old. We didn’t have the scale calibrated quite right, but she was probably around 30 grams.

7 days old.

Chunking up a bit, and it’s not just feathers.

That’s my baby!

Rachel’s learning how to graph their growth.

The weighing photos are some of their cutest.

Mercy looks so tender in one of her early photos. She’s still the smallest chick, despite her abundant fluff. It’s hard to believe she’ll be a giant Brahma chicken-the Queen of Chickens-one day!

This has to be one of Honey’s best pics. She looks so smug, like she knows she’s the plumpest chick in the flock.

Then there’s sweet Glory, posing like a supermodel.

The chicks have become pretty tame. This week we bought a secondhand dog playpen, and I’ve been sitting with them every day.

They usually flap around, pooping everywhere. That part is hard to get used to. But they’re so darn cute. I just wipe it up (and do a lot of laundry).

To continue taming the chicks, I try to offer little treats in my hand. The first few times, I just soaked their regular chick feed in water. According to the internet, chicks go wild for soaked feed. And as it’s literally their food and water, they’re nothing unsafe about offering it even to the youngest babies.

The internet was right. They loved it.

In subsequent days, though, I struck out. First it was scrambled eggs. Don’t be shocked—it’s not cannibalism! Chicks are literally nourished by the contents of their egg before hatching. So when they’re very young, or ill, an egg gently scrambled in the tiniest bit of oil is supposedly a wonderful thing. But my chicks had not read the internet, and weren’t at all interested in the egg.

Same goes for fresh-picked clover and chopped green grapes, supposed to be chick favorites. Both went over like chopped liver. (And I thought my humans were picky eaters).

But something even better happened. The chickies started climbing up on me! Maybe they’ve imprinted on me as mommy chicken. Maybe they just like climbing things. Most likely, they were chilly and seeking a heat source.

As nap time approached, more chicks piled on.

And more. They had a good snooze, and I had some very peaceful moments sitting there holding my warm little babies.

Then Thursday, when the chicks were 10 days old, Beyoncé got sick. She had diarrhea, a swollen crop in her neck, and was panting a lot. The other chicks were pecking at her more than usual (chickens are ruthless when they sense weakness). I worried about her all day and sought advice online.

Chicken forums said it could be coccidiosis, a common infection in young chicks. I overnighted some Corid (amprolium), which deprives the cocci organism of the thiamine it requires, thereby giving the chick’s immune system a chance to fight.

Many chicken people emphasized how delicate the chicks are at this age, and how they can deteriorate and die in a matter for hours.

Later that night, with Beyoncé looking worse, I contacted the Chicken Lady who sold us the chicks. Her reply began with, “I’m sorry, but I don’t think the chick is going to make it.” That scared me, I tell you. The Chicken Lady has a lot of chicken experience. We could only hope she was wrong.

All I could do until the medicine arrived was hold Beyoncé in my hands and keep her warm. I massaged her swollen crop and it did go down over time. Rachel and Joe started setting up a separate “chickie hospital” brooder, in case isolation was in order. But in the end she looked more comfortable with her sisters. Rachel prayed she would make it through the night.

And she did.

By the next morning, little Miss Beyoncé looked a lot brighter. She still tired more easily, though.

She really enjoyed taking a warm nap in my makeshift Birdie Bjorn. I might have imagined it, but the other chicks looked jealous.

That afternoon, she joined her sisters in a Mommy cuddle.

Then the other chicks started having diarrhea too. Now they’re all on the Corid (it’s mixed in their water). But they seem healthy and happy.

Beyoncé’s illness was our first scare with the chicks. I’m always surprised at how opening our hearts to love somebody, be it human or animal, dog or chicken, makes us vulnerable to hurt. Even the idea of losing this 50-gram tiny fluff ball, whom I’d known for 8 days at that point, made my heart ache.

Because all this was happening, I had to miss our church retreat. Joe and Rachel drove out for a weekend of woods and spiritual refreshment, while I stayed home to take care of the babies. We divide and conquer in this household.

That meant I had more time to work on chicken projects. Here’s our chicken yard in progress. The reddish coop is along the far fence. I spent the day digging deep holes and setting the wood fence posts in gravel and concrete. A recently constructed compost bin and fencing materials litter the foreground.

There was also chickie cuddling. Like, a lot of chickie cuddling.

Here’s a close up of little Mercy’s feathered feet. Remember, she’s the one who will grow up to look like she’s wearing pants and snowshoes:

Beyoncé also has feathered legs. I’m not sure why, except that as an Easter Egger, she’s likely a mix of several breeds.

As you can see, I didn’t get much else done because it’s so much fun to hang out with the chicks.

Little Glory fell right asleep in my hand. She’s getting to be the tamest one, but they are all pretty friendly and tame already.

Rachel and Joe came back after two days, a bit tired from all the excitement and activity of the retreat, and shocked at how much the chicks had grown.

Rachel spent some time getting reacquainted with everybody.

She was so relieved Beyoncé was better.

Our next adventure? Taking the chicks out for a little field trip in the yard, providing it’s warm out. They’re ready to explore a bigger world!