New Delivery at the Kohl House!!!

Spencer and I are proud to annouce the arrival of some new family members here at the Kohl Homestead. No it's not our baby...although somedays I wish I was done. It is the arrival of our new baby chickens. The chicks are so tiny and cute. And they are so active. So much more so than our last batch. We have four different breeds this time. Some are hens and some are roosters. We bought some Americana's which lay different colored eggs...like easter eggs. I'll never need to dye an egg again! And then we got some Leghorns..."It's a...it's a...it's a joke son...", and some Black Australorps chickens and some Broilers. The Leghorns are egg layers, up to 300 eggs a year as well as the Australorps who put out basically one egg a day. The broilers are meat chickens; they will not be able to live longer than six to eight weeks because they gain so much weight their little legs would break under the weight. That's the type of chicken you normal folks buy in a grocery store. That's why they are so meaty...they have been genetically selected to just get fat fast then die before they reach the two month old mark. Anyway, they will be tasty, and hopefully have more meat than our Rhode Island Reds do. Meredith loves them. She held one earlier, but when we tried to get a picture she became nervous and dropped the poor thing. Spencer didn't want to risk it again. So she is only allowed to look, and not touch for a while. We also got four quail eggs so we can start breeding them as well. Did you know that a dozen quail eggs sells for around eight dollars! That's crazy money there...you don't even get one whole chicken egg with four of those things. So if we can find a market to sell their eggs around here we'll be making bank, especially since quails are so small and don't eat much. And they are very tender and good meat birds as well since they have to be caged...a little harder to domesticate than a chicken, plus they can fly. Spencer has been using his Spring break to till up the yard for our garden. We are hoping on making some money at a farmer's market this summer. So we started some plants in our green houses several weeks ago. The weather here is relatively warm, so we should be able to plant in a few weeks. There is just such a strong root system with our grass that it's hard for him to till up everything. He's been over the ground at least four times now and he has another three or four times left before it will be really turned up and ready for planting. Someone at church was nice enough to lend us their tiller, and someone offered to pick it up for Spencer as well. The chickens love all the dirt he's turned up...all the poor unsuspecting insects that thought they were still safe beneath the soil...well at least it was a quick way to go. But this should be a decent venture to go into since we had a pretty successful crop last year, and there are two farmer's markets around here each week. We could make a pretty penny. If not, then we just have a ton of salad to eat in a few months. With all the chicken we could do a Chicken Cesar Salad marathon...come on down.