Our Journey to Self-Sufficiency: Raising Chickens at Home

As long as I can remember I’ve had dreams of having a small homestead growing & preserving our own food with chickens, ducks, and goats… While the property we’re on currently does not have enough space for all the animals I’d like to raise, we’ve finally got started on our self sufficiency with some baby chicks!

We picked up 6 cream legbar chicks from a local farmer back in February! The baby chicks were born on 2/10/2025. Below was the day we brought them home – our daughter was (and still is) super excited to see and hold the chickies! Though, teaching a toddler how to be gentle with the chicks is an ongoing job.

Cream Legbar Chicks are an auto-sexing variety of chicken, meaning you can tell the males from females just by their coloring immediately when they hatch. So we *should* have all female hens for egg production. I say “should” because I feel like theres always room for error.

Cream Legbar are a blue egg laying variety of hen, they are supposed to be excellent layers with 280+ eggs per year.

Look at these cuties!! They started getting their wing feathers in at about 1 week old. and have just continued to grow from there.

The baby chicks are 4 weeks old now and growing so fast! When we first brought them home we had one that was lighter in color than the rest so we tentatively named her Henriette….knowing full well that we would lose track of her as they began getting their feathers in. As of today, 4 weeks in, I have no idea which one is Henrietta. We do have one that is now significantly darker than the rest! We’ll be going with “old lady names” as our name theme. Final naming will commence once they’re all fully feathered and we see what everyone looks like.

Until now, the ladies have been spending their days in the big tupperware tub seen in the pictures above. Once they started trying to fly we moved them into a tent with a screen top that is made for small animals. They’re still under a heatlamp, and will be until they are fully feathered.

We’ve started building their coop in our backyard, and hope to have it completed this coming weekend!

More to come on coop construction!