An offer almost anyone can refuse

One of our chicken-syndicate participants has dropped out. Through a series of trades, swaps, barters & impulse purchases, she has more viable eggs already in the incubator than she needs chicks & cannot face the thought of more & so we have...

Wait a minute! I bet you are all asking yourselves what is a chicken syndicate? Well, there is a minimum order of 25 birds (it is a survival thing) but no one really wants 25 birds. On the other hand, three or four or five of us can easily split 40+ birds. & so we started ordering together about 6 years ago. maybe seven. We do not order every year & everyone does not order every time, but around January the phone lines start buzzing.

So we have more Salmon Favorelles en route than we actually need. I will of course step into the breach & make them my own. I did order some for myself, though. Plus the extras just-in-case. This is why I am asking around: who wants to take a couple off my hands? They are already paid for (& would run to a whopping $3 each if they were not). I think the next town over permits two hens per family generally & quite a few gated communities have come around. As for the smaller towns to the west, north & south well anything goes really.

The chickens would: take care of any bug problems you, breakdown your garden post-harvest, & give you roughly an egg or so a day (between the two of them) & probably more. They would need a place to live, I suggest an old rabbit hutch, with hay in the enclosed part for nesting. The liftable lid makes it easy to clean, too. A has made henhouses out of a number of salvaged things: the peep-house is an old air conditioner housing (the vents are PERFECT for letting in air & cannot get clogged like the fine mesh needed to keep snakes out, the nesting boxes out of the drawers from former bathroom vanities (e handles are great for pulling them in & out without disturbing the birds...too much) & the old bird bos out of the packing cases from a ?microscope? or some piece of equipment that came to the lab.

They would also need a fenced yard (or fenced garden portion of a yard) they can safely cruise for an hour or two every day or a day or two every week, some extra feed (a 50lb bag runs less than 8 dollars & will last a while, longer if they can go out every day).

Best of all, SF's are among the stoopider chickens. & like stoopid people, stoopid chickens are too much fun to watch. If you are local & think you might be interested, let me know. They will be too small to leave the flock until say Labor Day - Hallowe'en-ish but living so far south, they will winter just fine & start laying around the New Year.