I apologize if this has been asked already (I’ll happily accept links!).
Now that I have all of my “chickens” in a row for my heritage breed breeding pens, i’m turning my attention to my olive egger project! My goals are to produce a large (hopefully dual purpose) bird that can lay multiple shades of earthy tones. Speckles are always fun to include. Eventually, if I can work with this group for multiple generations, it would be fun to produce a line with cold hardy combs.
For options for this project, I currently have:
-Variety of F1, F2, & BC1 olive egger pullets and cockerels from local breeders
-Olive Egger F1 pullets from a hatchery
-Welsummer Cockerel from a large speckled egg
-BCM Cockerel from dark chocolate egg (5-7 on scale?)
-Variety of blue egg layer pullets (for a different project, but could also use)
-*hopefully* 1-2 homozygous blue cockerels (pending blood tests before breeding)
The Welsummer and BCM cockerels were from BEAUTIFUL hatching eggs and my hope is to keep potentially both of them in the same pen with our favorite olive egger hens. Good plan, or should I go a different route? The local olive egger pullets include CLB and WTB based crosses. Would the resulting offspring be considered BC1? I’m hoping to not have to buy additional breeds, but I’m a hatch-a-holic, so I could be convinced.
Now that I have all of my “chickens” in a row for my heritage breed breeding pens, i’m turning my attention to my olive egger project! My goals are to produce a large (hopefully dual purpose) bird that can lay multiple shades of earthy tones. Speckles are always fun to include. Eventually, if I can work with this group for multiple generations, it would be fun to produce a line with cold hardy combs.
For options for this project, I currently have:
-Variety of F1, F2, & BC1 olive egger pullets and cockerels from local breeders
-Olive Egger F1 pullets from a hatchery
-Welsummer Cockerel from a large speckled egg
-BCM Cockerel from dark chocolate egg (5-7 on scale?)
-Variety of blue egg layer pullets (for a different project, but could also use)
-*hopefully* 1-2 homozygous blue cockerels (pending blood tests before breeding)
The Welsummer and BCM cockerels were from BEAUTIFUL hatching eggs and my hope is to keep potentially both of them in the same pen with our favorite olive egger hens. Good plan, or should I go a different route? The local olive egger pullets include CLB and WTB based crosses. Would the resulting offspring be considered BC1? I’m hoping to not have to buy additional breeds, but I’m a hatch-a-holic, so I could be convinced.