Mjismom
Songster
- Jan 31, 2025
- 95
- 258
- 106
Hello everyone! We are a homeschooling family that adopted 4 chickens (2 buffs, 1 sex link, 1 rhode island red) about a year ago. Things didn’t go very well with those 4 hens - one died from mites we thought we had taken care of, the red was re-homed because she was bullying the other smaller chickens, the third died from unknown illness, and fourth we re-homed because she was alone.
So my fellow chicken loving friend suggested that since we are homeschooling and it’s an awesome science project (and she had an incubator we could borrow!) that we could start over and incubate eggs to refill our flock! We are very excited! I don’t know anyone who hasn’t wanted baby chicks as a child so I am so happy to be able to bless our kids with this experience.
And because we are so excited, we are praying daily that it goes well!
Thank you so much for this amazingly helpful community! I read about these hatch-a-long posts and thought that sounded really fun!
So here is where we are at currently:
Sunday 2/2:
It is now Tuesday 2/4 (day 2 right?) and tomorrow (day 3) I plan to take the eggs out of the cartons, number them, and lay them in the egg turner.
I never knew this would be such a practice in the virtue of patience!! Yikes! I am dying to know if they are developing since the kids are so excited about the silkies and I would feel so bad to disappoint them. I pray I did everything right! Thank you for your support!
So my fellow chicken loving friend suggested that since we are homeschooling and it’s an awesome science project (and she had an incubator we could borrow!) that we could start over and incubate eggs to refill our flock! We are very excited! I don’t know anyone who hasn’t wanted baby chicks as a child so I am so happy to be able to bless our kids with this experience.
And because we are so excited, we are praying daily that it goes well!
Thank you so much for this amazingly helpful community! I read about these hatch-a-long posts and thought that sounded really fun!
So here is where we are at currently:
- We ordered 6 silkie eggs and 6 Easter egger eggs from sellers on eBay.
- Silkies hatched Sun 1/26, arrived safely Thur 1/30, I placed them pointed end down in a carton on the counter until the Easter eggers arrived.
- Easter egger eggs arrived safely on Sat 2/1 and I placed them pointed end down on the counter with their silkie buddies.
Sunday 2/2:
- I cleaned the eggs under running warm/cool water with a soft cloth because many of them were covered in poop.
- I let the incubator run overnight and finally got the humidity right and put the eggs in on Sunday 2/2 at 4pm (this is 7 days after the silkie eggs were laid, so I hope they are alright). They are at 99.5 degrees and 45-55% humidity.
- Since it was recommended for shipped eggs to keep them pointed end down and not turning for the first 3-5 days, I left the eggs in clean plastic egg cartons and put the egg cartons into the incubator like that. My friend let me borrow her fabulous Nurture Right 360.
It is now Tuesday 2/4 (day 2 right?) and tomorrow (day 3) I plan to take the eggs out of the cartons, number them, and lay them in the egg turner.
I never knew this would be such a practice in the virtue of patience!! Yikes! I am dying to know if they are developing since the kids are so excited about the silkies and I would feel so bad to disappoint them. I pray I did everything right! Thank you for your support!
