It has been a rather odd winter. No real cold, very little precipitation. Just an odd winter! I took the above pick in the Fall. I am very ready for spring, and I am hoping the weather people are wrong, and the drought just breaks. I am looking forward to gardening.

    Much of homesteading is educated guess work, and observation. It is watching the times and seasons, and planning based upon experience, but still having flexibility, when created nature is under another plan. Take February, please! Sometimes I'd like to give it away. It is often my most frustrating month garden wise. I am always in a hurry to get started gardening, and February is always in the way:^)

     I never start planting much of anything, except peas, fava beans, and potatoes before the 2nd two weeks of February. The first two weeks of February, are usually quite cold here in Oklahoma. It seems like the first two weeks of February are winter's last gasp, at least usually. This year, I'm just not sure what is happening! I was seriously about to start planting in earnest, when all of a sudden, weather people started talking anew about cold. Bummer! Not only that, but now they are showing clearly cold temperatures until the 3rd week in February! Curses! What is a desperate homesteader to do!

     Last night I went to the livestock auction. I bought two pairs of Silkie Chickens, and one rather nice Speckled Sussex chickens for $62. All the time I am sitting there saying to myself, why in the world would anybody want to spend the kind of money these people are spending on birds of unknown origins?

   If you buy a chicken for $15, at $1.50 per dozen, she has to lay 10 dozen eggs before she pays for herself! If that hen lays 4 times per week, (which I think is a reasonable expectation for an unknown commodity) then it will take her 30 weeks to pay for herself. This is almost 60% of a year, and does not include the feed that she is fed, or any care either! Now since there is no way to be truly sure of the hen's age, this could be a significant chunk of her productive life, and there is no way of knowing if you will receive any profit at all!

   There is only one way that one hen could be made to be profitable in the above case, reproduction! That means that either her eggs need to be incubated by you, or she has to reliably incubate them herself! Unfortunately much of the broodiness has been bread out of the most commercially available chickens.

   This brings me to my reason for being at this particular auction, and also why I spent so much money myself. My goal is to produce a reliably reproductive flock! On the homestead, eggs are not the only reason to raise chickens. We raise our chickens for meat! Constantly having to buy chickens to butcher defeats the purpose! Therefore, we have to come to the point where we have a reliably productive flock, that provides both meat and eggs.

   To my way of thinking, this means cross-breeding! We need to breed the instinct back into our flock, and just regular selection is not fast enough, nor does it return a strong healthy population to our coop! So this is the project I am working on! I am crossing some big chickens to some bantams, and then selecting for size, broodiness, and livability, rather than egg production! My eventual goal is to be able to eat eggs regularly, eat chicken with the family twice a week, and produce enough of my own chicks every year through natural means to make that happen!

     Follow my adventures in the next few years, as I try to reach that goal!