Your Flock's Outdoor Spaces
Coops & runs
Gardening With Your Chickens
Gardening and chickens go together as well as peanut butter and jelly! Chances are if you’re into raising chickens, you probably also have a green thumb, or maybe you at least want to have a green thumb but maybe haven’t had much luck gardening in the past. Chickens can help!
Breed Spotlight: Raising Heritage Turkeys
Everything that I read boasted about the amazing taste of the heritage turkey breeds and their great foraging abilities. So naturally, I needed to give them a try. Due to the minimum order requirement of 20 for heritage turkey breeds and not wanting quite so many turkeys I split an order with a fellow Meyer Hatchery Remote team member, Sarah. For my portion of the order, I received six Bourbon Red, three Black Spanish, and three Midget White. Sarah’s order included three Chocolate, three Royal Palm, three Blue Slate, and three Narragansett.
Top 10 Best Chicken Reads
Attention all chicken enthusiasts! Do you enjoy reading or learning about chickens? If so please be sure to check out what I call my top 10 chicken reads! I have selected a wide variety of books that cover anything and everything chicken related from identification, health, handling, and raising, showing and even cooking.
How to Turn a Horse Stall Into a Chicken Coop
When building a chicken coop, the hardest and most expensive part is usually building the structure itself. The size of the coop, location, materials available, and your budget all need to be taken into consideration when building a new coop. When converting a horse stall into a chicken coop, this hard part is mostly all already done!
Heritage Turkeys and Coop Tour
In this coop tour, Amanda and Sarah from the Customer Service Remote Team are at Sarah’s farm to show you their new heritage turkey poults and give you a tour of Sarah’s coops.
My Journey to Backyard Chickens
Renee writes her first Meyer Hatchery Blog and talks about how she began with her backyard chickens. It’s not what you would expect!
Let’s Learn: Chicken Egg Anatomy 101
As an Agriculture teacher one of my favorite topics to teach about is poultry. There are so many topics and discussions to cover that I could teach a year round class on poultry alone and would not be able to cover everything. With that being said, I do believe it is important to understand the anatomy of the egg itself.
Breed Spotlight: The Delaware
The Delaware chicken breed has a rich history that begins in the early 1940’s in Ocean View, Delaware. Learn more about the Delaware here!
Meyer Hatchery Chicken Tractor Tour
Marie raises her Cornish cross meat birds in this chicken tractor set up. She raises 8 batches a year of 25 birds at a time, and this year she is trying all females instead of a straight run mix. So far she has noticed that the females tend to be less pushy at feeding time than the males.
Protecting Against Predators
In this coop tour, Jess from the Remote Customer Service Team shows us her summer coop set up, how she deals with the challenges of their location, and how she protects her chickens and ducks from predators.
Auto-sexing versus Sex-linked Hybrid Breeds
The desire to have as many female chicks as possible is so great that there are specific breeds of chickens that have been bred so that the flock owner or hatchery can determine the gender of day-old chicks more easily. Breeds that are either autosexing breeds or sex-linked hybrid breeds produce chicks that are slightly different colors between the genders at hatch.
Breed Spotlight: The Rhode Island Red
The Rhode Island Red originated in Little Compton, Rhode Island in the mid 1800’s, making it one of the oldest American-bred chicken breeds. It began in farmers’ homestead flocks, where a highly productive egg layer was needed, but whose excess roosters could still dress out as decent table birds.
Why Isn’t My Frizzle Chick Frizzled?
The frizzle feathering sometimes found in chickens is a rare occurrence, and therefore highly desired in some breeds. Here is an overview of how the frizzle feather mutation occurs and why not all chicks sold as frizzles will have frizzled feathers.
Why Blue Chicken Breeds May Not Look Blue
One of the most enjoyable things about keeping chickens is the vast range of different colors and patterns that the chicken breeds can display, allowing us all to have a beautiful flock. But in a few breeds, the chick you receive in your flock may grow up to not resemble the breed’s photo on our website or in our catalog. Here’s an explanation of why the blue chicken breeds will also have black and splash chicks as possible color variations you may receive.
Cold Weather Chicken Coop Prep
The days are getting shorter, football season has arrived and before long winter will be upon us. Is your chicken coop ready? Here’s a list of things I do to prepare my laying flock and their housing for the cold months ahead.
Cleaning and Storing Freshly Laid Eggs
Cleaning is not always necessary, as freshly laid eggs have a protective layer called the “bloom”, that seals out bacteria and allows the eggs to last longer outside of the refrigerator. Consider this when deciding where you’ll be storing them.
Always try to provide fresh bedding for your hens to help keep eggs cleaner (and keep your girls happier also!) Fresh bedding will not always guarantee cleanliness, but will give you a better probability.
Using the Incredible Egg WasherKit: Clean Eggs Sell!
You can certainly use plain hot tap water to wash the eggs, but I have found the Incredible Egg Washer kit to be a much more effective and efficient way to clean the eggs. Since I have a large flock and gather about 60 eggs a day, I was spending about 30 minutes hand washing each egg at my kitchen sink.
More Than Just Chicks: How to Raise Exotic Pheasants
Meyer Hatchery carries a variety of exotic pheasants, take a look at general overview on how to raise exotic pheasants to start your adventure today!
