Raising SILKIE CHICKENS: Viewer Questions About Silkie Chickens Answered

[@ljtminihomestead5839]

Merry Christmas! 😊

[@deborahtofflemire7727]

Where are your other channels?

[@HickorycroftFarm]

Hopefully the links work, but they are: Life Raising Sheep: www.youtube.com/@liferaisingsheep Pantry Living: www.youtube.com/@PantryLiving

[@TheOldSwedesFarm]

It sounds like you've got an overall plan and that is why you'll be successful with breeding. So many people get into chickens without a plan and wonder why they fail. You've got a great plan on the avian flu. For us it's near impossible to keep them separate from wild birds. Great video!!

[@HickorycroftFarm]

Well, we will see how it all goes. So far, so good! I do think you are right, though it's easy to get into chickens without much of a plan and though you don't usually get into as much trouble as bringing how say a cow with no plan (lol) but you're right it's easy to fail if you don't have a plan and stick to it (obviously with some adjustments over time). it's pretty hard for us to keep them isolated too, but for us, it's not so much a case of doing that all the time (since we are small scale), but knowing if we had to, we could.

[@VictorsFarmingAdventures]

Fast qwestion... do you sell or trade these birds?

[@HickorycroftFarm]

We do; we haven't sold any silkies yet (we are just not at that point with them yet), but we likely will in the future.

[@maplewoodhomestead2017]

Thats awesome that they are still laying without artificial light! This is great information for those considering silkies.

[@HickorycroftFarm]

They have surprised us, to be honest, even with all the research we did first. They are such an easy chicken to manage.

[@janew5351]

Loved the Q and A about the new Silkies! Do you think i could keep 2 in my basement over the 5 months of winter?

[@HickorycroftFarm]

Glad you enjoyed it! We thought it was a great way to answer Larry's questions from a previous video! You probably could, to be honest. They are not that messy (by chicken standards). And they can actually be pretty personable too (not that all chickens can't be quite pet-like)

[@ThorHavenFarm]

Great information! Love this!

[@HickorycroftFarm]

Thanks so much! We are really enjoying the silkies. They are so easy to work with, cheap to feed, and still very decent producers.

[@maplewoodhomestead2017]

I didn't realize they had different colored skin!

[@HickorycroftFarm]

skin and meat (it's actually colored blue or blackish, not the same as dark meat on a normal chicken). It's quite interesting!

[@lejansma]

I would like to know more about your backstory…how you met, how you got into homesteading etc

[@larrylewis3573]

Dear Chris, Thank you very much for answering my questions regarding your Silkie chickens. I am glad that they were not a burden to you and that you saw fit to make video in answer to them. As always, you gave full answers, and I am glad to have a fuller picture of your plans for your flock. I really do like how you think things through. Very valuable for your viewers. As you might expect I am very much looking forward to the progress reports you will provide. It will be interesting to see how the silkies meet your needs and goals. It will also be interesting to see what adjustments you make based on the experience you gain during this initial period. Naturally, I hope all goes well both in the short-term and the long-term. Wishing you and your family all that is good. Merry Christmas and many blessings in the New Year. Sincerely, Larry Lewis London, Ontario.

[@pseudopetrus]

I recognize that Hickorycroft is about being independent, but if you work with trusted breeders, and you know how to breed and select high quality breeding stock, you can keep an appropriate amount of genetic heterozygosity by trading birds every three or four years. But that is the catch, your own birds need to be desirable and high quality, just as you expect your trading partner to maintain high quality. So for those who might only be able to manage two or three breeding lines, if you have trusted partners, you can still enjoy breeding a small flock.

[@daveknight1154]

I had forgotten the size of the eggs of selkies. My Dad always have selkies and other bantam breeds because he said during the war people in town could raise them in backyard coops. He raised them for show birds and they where pets to me.

[@HickorycroftFarm]

It's pretty impressive how big the eggs are for the size of the birds. Bantams have been through history a good option for people for exactly that reason: you can raise them in a relatively small space with few resources compared to larger birds. There is an interesting thing about the Dutch bantam that it exists because, at one time, there was a "tax" on eggs in its region of origin that all normal-sized eggs had to be handed over to the king (I think at the time), so people kept the smaller birds to avoid that "egg tax" so to speak. (I'm not getting the story 100% right, but). Anyway, it's one of those things the promise of "bigger is better" is not always the case!

[@marcus3457]

I appreciate the video, great information. Just curious what your take is on chicken tractors, and using them as a way to follow your chickens behind your sheep on pasture, effectively using the chicken as a dead end host?

[@HickorycroftFarm]

Chicken tractors can be great, but the one thing we have found using them in the past is your pasture has to be pretty flat to make it work well and not lose birds to predators at night. The other option is to have a Justin Rhodes style "tractor" that you lock the birds up in at night only and let them out to range in the larger pasture during the day, but the problem we have had with chickens in the past is they don't always want to go in at night, and you have to wait till dark to put them away (not such a big issue with silkies though). I'm not 100% sure that chickens are the "best" dead-end host for sheep parasites like barber poll worms just because of the worm's lifecycle (they almost need a grazer to eat the grass since the larvae are on the grass blades mostly). Cows or horses are probably the "best" dead-end hosts, to be honest, since they both actually graze but also bring a whole host of other issues with management, etc., pending how you set up.