The story so far...

Hello and welcome to my blog!

I was lucky enough to grow up on a farm, and I kept a few bantams as a boy. As an adult, I've had hens now for over 10 years, and I'm still learning! I love my hens - they give me so much pleasure, and lovely fresh eggs as well - what more could you ask for?

At the moment I have 8 hens: 5 Barnevelders, 2 Rhode Island Reds (Ruby and Rosemary) and a Black Rock (JD). Here's a photo of Ruby, Rosemary and JD taking it easy on the perch in their run.

I'm looking to add to my flock this year, and instead of buying point of lay pullets (young hens just starting to lay, usually 16-22 weeks old depending on the breed), I thought I'd try hatching some chicks. I don't have a rooster (cockerel) with my hens so the eggs they lay aren't fertile. Since this is my first attempt at hatching eggs, I did not want to spend a lot on eggs from a breeder, so I bought some eggs from a local garden centre that keeps hens (with a rooster of course!). They sell the eggs for eating, so they only cost me about £2 for a dozen. I filled my little incubator and switched it on.

That was nearly 3 weeks ago. After a couple of weeks, I checked the eggs by candling them (shining a light through the egg to see what's inside). Unfortunately, out of the seven eggs in the incubator, only one was fertile. This is why you should always buy eggs for hatching - the eggs I bought had very poor fertility probably because there were too many hens for only one rooster (even though the person who sold the eggs to me assured me the rooster was very active!).

Anyway, I managed to obtain some more (hopefully more fertile) eggs and replaced the infertile eggs in the incubator with them. So now I have one egg in the incubator due to hatch within the next day or two, and another six due to hatch in just over 2 weeks. This has complicated things slightly for me because I've had to turn the auto turning feature on the incubator off because of the egg that's nearly ready to hatch and this means I'll have to turn the other six eggs manually until this first egg hatches.