I say that in jest, but it’s the truth. If you’re thinking about chickens, be prepared to shake up your entire life. Now, maybe there are some who could have a few chickens and a handful of fresh eggs and be satisfied staying in the same neighborhood that allows backyard poultry, but apparently, I’m not that girl. Turns out, I’m far from that girl. I’m more surprised by this than anyone.

I grew up an Army brat, moving from post to post for most of my life. My father retired when I was in high school, and we lived in the heart of suburbia at the time. HOAs, manicured lawns, clubhouse swimming pools, fancy cars – you get the picture – are the norm where we ended up settling. Farm life was foreign and far away. It was something that was interesting from a distance, in a school field trip sort of way. Fun to visit, but not for me. I might get dirty. I had dreams of moving to a big city, becoming a journalist, and living over a coffee shop in an exposed brick walls condo. Think Carrie Bradshaw but without the short skirts.

Goodness; today I couldn’t be further from that lifestyle if I tried. There’s nothing wrong with living the big city life, but my life has taken several twists and turns that have steered me away from that, and I don’t even know that big city dreams girl anymore. I think about my might-have-been-life, and it’s as foreign to me now as farm life was to me when I was young.

If you’re anything like me, you’ll get some chickens, learn the ropes, and be content with that… for a while. But not too far down the road, you’re going to want some land and to move to the country, because chances are, you’re going to catch farm fever and tell your spouse you want to uproot your entire life and start a farm.

But I digress – back to the chickens.

My husband came home from his military training in the summer of 2020, and he had barely gotten his clothes unpacked and settled back into family life when I dropped a bomb on him. “Hubby, I’ve been thinking…” He didn’t know it at the time, but in the context of our farm life, he now knows the weight of what that phrase carries. But he didn’t know then, so he, so blissfully unaware, asked me to elaborate.

Bless his heart.

I think I need to stop here for a moment and just explain something about chicken math. It doesn’t work the way regular math works. It’s funny. Remember when I said chickens are the gateway farm animal?

Four chickens became six. Six became twelve. Twelve became fifteen. We lost a few, but then we bought some more, and we ended up with eighteen. You see where this is going, right? I now have thirty-five chickens, writing this post in January of 2022. But in 2020, we stopped at the eighteen. Or was it twenty at some point? I didn’t necessarily set out to have that many chickens, but it just kind of snowballed. Chicken math is funny.

At the start of this chicken endeavor, we bought this little six-chicken capacity coop from a local farm supply store. This is where four chickens became six, because the coop capacity was six, so why not get two more and have the max chickens I could for the space? That was my reasoning at the time, and somehow my hubby went with it. What can I say? The man is a saint.

But all that said, it didn’t take long before we realized the coop wasn’t made of the highest quality materials. For the price, you’d think it would have been something better, but you’d be wrong. It had some misbuilt parts we just couldn’t make work, so in the end we returned that coop to the store and decided building one ourselves would be the way to go.

My brother-in-law is pretty handy with building projects, so we enlisted/begged him to come up from his home in Mississippi to help us with the build. It somehow became this twenty-chicken capacity monstrosity built as affordably as we could (remember, we’re still in the middle of a pandemic). We used free pallets and materials we already had on-hand, and we spent just under $200 on extra materials at the home improvement store. Not too bad, considering the pre-built, curse-inducing-assembly coop from the store was about twice that much, and had begun to fall apart after just a couple of rainstorms.

So after a sweltering weekend under the June Alabama sun, we got the chicken coop built. This is where six chickens turned into twelve. So, some hatcheries and stores have chick minimums you have to buy. They won’t let you just buy one or two, depending on the time of year, hence why we were buying them in weird numbers.

Once the big coop was built, my sister wanted to buy some Silkies. She loves cute, fluffy animals, and if you don’t know what a Silkie chicken is, it’s a tiny, fluffy little bird. They are child-friendly, docile, cuddly, and just all-around cute. My sister doesn’t have a farm, and she’s not interested in owning chickens, so she lives vicariously through mine. She wants to cuddle them, and that’s about it, which is fine with me. She and her husband offer help when we need it, and their help is worth its weight in gold. So off to the farm store to buy some Silkies! That’s how six chickens became twelve. We added three more after that, and then I forget how the others came about. They just sort of start multiplying in inexplicable ways. So I had eighteen by the end of 2020. I think at one point I had an even twenty, but things happen on farms, and sometimes you lose a chicken or two. That’s never easy, but it does teach you.

I always learn something from failure. Failure is never fun or easy, but if you can take a lesson from it and know better for the next time, then it was worth it. I’ll save those lessons for another day.

So, we had the chickens. We had the coop. By September/October, we had eggs, as well.

That’s about when I said to my hubby, “Hubby, I’ve been thinking…”