My Pet Chicken Blog

Let me introduce myself! I’ll be My Pet Chicken’s newest flock member and chicken blogger, so I’d like to share a little about myself. My name is Sam, although I prefer to be called Farmer Sam by my chicken keeping friends. I live in Fairfield, Connecticut where I raise chickens and sheep.  I started my chicken keeping adventure with three production red hens I got from our local feed store. Not long after I got them, I started my first  blog, called “Connecticut Chickens.”  While trying to get more readers I volunteered to give a talk at our local feed store’s springtime chicken keeping seminar.

That was where I first met My Pet Chicken’s Traci. Traci helped open my eyes a little more to the many amazing chicken breeds that exist, and to how the chicken keeping industry worked!

Our barn

One day, a few months after the seminar, we were buying chicken feed at the feed store and overheard a lady talking about her sheep. We asked her about them a little and after looking at the photo of them we were convinced we had to have some. She kindly brought us to her home to meet her sheep. After visiting her farm, we went online to find breeders who had the breed we wanted. We found one not too far away and arranged a visit. The sheep she had were a set of twins just under a year old. We immediately began preparations for them and in no time we were ready to take them home.  We would never have had that opportunity if we hadn’t entered the backyard farming world with our wonderful chickens!

As a chicken blogger, you may often see me write about how chickens are a “gateway” animal, and will always be leading you to new kinds of farm animals and pets. That was my experience! After getting the sheep, I decided that I had so many fun stories to write about them that my Connecticut Chickens blog needed to be expanded to incorporate my new interest, too. That’s why I created a new blog called Hens and Hooves. Now, I’m more than a chicken blogger! After reading some of my posts there, Traci kindly asked me to blog for My Pet Chicken, too.

Two of our sheep

I have approximately 50 chickens of many different ages right now. I have a very diverse laying flock made up of large fowl breeds from My Pet Chicken. My “mini flock” is made up of mostly Silkies, but a few other bantams too.

We are not inclined to keep roosters as it is usually not pleasing to the neighbors, but we have kept them for a couple weeks to fertilize eggs for our broody hens. We will occasionally buy fertile eggs from alternate sources to get new breeds and varieties to hatch in our incubator, since we don’t usually have eggs to hatch from our own flock.

Welsummer hen

One of my goals as a chicken blogger and keeper of chickens is to encourage others to join me in the wonderful journey of chicken keeping. To say chicken keeping has changed my life is an understatement. Now, I really cannot imagine my life without chickens, or the wonderful people I meet in my chicken keeping adventures!  If you’re not already a chicken keeper, hopefully this chicken blogger will be able to help change that. If you already raise chickens, hopefully I’ll enable you to go farther in your chicken keeping endeavors and maybe even move onto other fun farm animals, like sheep! 

In any case, you can now expect fun posts from me about the feathered and woolly friends here on our farm. I am truly honored to be the newest chicken blogger at this amazing company, My Pet Chicken.

Yours in Chicken  Keeping,

Farmer Sam