Welcome The Savvy Hen!

I am going to take a break from getting you all up to speed on chicken life here in Boulder and talk about something exciting, a new store! I know, I know, how do I have time to shop with 9 chickens in the coop and a 2 year old?! It's not exactly shopping, more like quick browsing while the 2 year old is entertained by her father outside the shop. This does not happen often at all.  Many restaurants will open up, be on my radar and then shut their doors before we have even had a chance to pop in.  This was not going to be the case with the new chicken store in town.  I had to see it, right away!

The Savvy Hen opened about 2 weeks ago at 1908 Pearl on the east end of the Pearl Street Mall in Boulder. I was hoping to find a weather vane or "fresh eggs" sign for our coop but I struck out. Perhaps I should give them a chance to build their inventory, after all, they haven't even been open 2 weeks! Or I could check Jenn and Lance's garage again.

Inside the store

My favorite thing in this adorable shop is the stainless steel buckets containing the "build your own chicken feed buffet bar!" Wow! what an awesome idea! This is the place to tailor your feed to your chickens' likes and needs. They even have grit, scratch and oyster shells. Since they haven't started laying, our chickens are not quite ready for oyster shells; but I was already stressing about having to leave the "Boulder bubble" and drive to Longmont to pick some up.  Boulderites, you know what I mean.

In addition to this buffet bar, they have heaps of books about everything from container gardening, cooking, homesteading, heirlooms, and making your own cheese! They sell organic potting soil, garden tools and heirloom seeds as well as potted succulents and some cute "gifty" chickens, ducks and home decor. This is also the place to find local, handmade candles and artisan body care items.  They also have bee keeping products, bird houses and custom made chicken coops. It looks like they may also offer classes in the store.

The Savvy Hen is stocked with everything an urban farmer in Boulder will need!  I am so excited they are here and that I can throw my baby in the bike trailer and hit the chicken feed buffet bar! Maybe, while I am at it, I can peruse the bee keeping section; hmmm, our own honey from the back yard, tempting, very tempting!

A roof over their heads

My husband and I planned to make an "eco" chicken coop out of completely salvaged or recycled materials we found at our local resource yard, so easy, no problem.  We wanted to keep costs low and the environmental impact to a minimum.

We searched in a few books and on the Web for the perfect coop plan for us. Turns out we would have to create our own, a few ideas from here, a few from here and voila! Home sweet home! If you are planning on building your own coop be sure to read these tips before you get started.  We really had to keep tip #1 in mind!

        Most of our materials actually came from cleaning out our friend's garage.  This garage was the Jackpot! Where else could you find heaps of power tools, a roll of chicken wire,multiple 4x6s, a plethora of 2x4s, tar paper, wooden pallets, and a metal rooster? We also found an eager helper, full of ideas, who made house calls! We were on our way, this will just take a weekend, we can work while the baby naps.....

Lance and his ideas on a house call!

City slickers. Ears covered for nail gun!

My sister and her kids were coming to town for their spring break.  I was excited for the opportunity to expose these city slickers to power tools, fresh air and baby chicks. Little did I know, a classic Colorado, freak, 2 foot, spring snow storm was also in store for them! Chicken coop completion set back #1.  What progress we had made with Lance the weekend before, came to a screeching halt when the snow rolled in! 

Meanwhile, in room 105.....

I am a first grade teacher. WAIT! before you mouse over and hit the unsubscribe button ,let me assure you that this is NOT a teaching blog.  You will not be wowed by my clip art skills and use of fancy fonts, nor will you find 1,000 uses for paper towel tubes and glitter to help kids read at grade level. Not my thing.

I thought the first grade students (4 sections) would enjoy incubating some eggs.  It was a nice tie-in with our life cycles unit and hopefully I would end up with some chickens for our coop and my students would have a real-life hands on experience. I found a woman on craigslist.com who had eggs for sale and was willing to take the chickens back if I was going to have too many in my coop.

This is where the eggs came from

The incubator was an antique I tell ya but at least it had an automatic turner so this teacher could stay home on the weekends with her baby and not worry about regulating temperature and rotating eggs every few hours. School on the weekends, not my thing.

The temperature inside an incubator needs to stay at a steady 100 degrees and the humidity needs to stay at 98 degrees.  The incubator has a wet and dry thermometer which our students were very diligent in checking every hour. I was made aware of even the slightest variance in temperature. Here in very dry Colorado the humidity was the biggest worry, with this class of 23 mama hens constantly doting on this incubator I knew we were not going to have any problems.
The incubator was in my classroom but the other 3 classes came over to spend time with the eggs and write in their chicken journals.

There are many life lessons to be learned from incubating and hopefully hatching eggs.  I was learning right along with my class and this was totally my thing. First off, the old saying "don't count your chickens before they hatch," wow, is this ever important! My class was already coming up with a list of 12 names for our new borns. They were discussing paint colors and picking out curtains for the nursery and the eggs hadn't even been with us a whole day! I didn't want them to get their hopes up so I told the class to pretend we were not going to be successful at all so that we would be pleasantly surprised if we had one hatch.  One of my students raises her hand and says "Mrs. J, what about staying positive? My mom always tells me to be positive, so let's pretend only one is going to hatch, that better than none." Wow! talk about learning from your students. Alright there you have it, class, we will hope that one will hatch and be thankful if we get more than that.

Everyday my students wrote in their egg journals documenting changes in the growing embryos inside the egg through candling and posters I found online with a "peek inside." We discussed chicken facts and chicken lingo such as pecking order, ruffle your feathers, and calling someone a chicken.  This was a fantastic, community building experience with the grade level. It's amazing to see behavior issues fall by the wayside when your entire class is engaged. This was easily the highlight of everyone's day and so far, it was just  a bunch of eggs in a bubble.

Fast forward 21 days and you have a classroom full of 23 expectant mothers. "Mrs. J, today is our due date, where are our chicks?" Another lesson about things growing at their own pace and babies coming when they are ready.  Go ask your mothers if you were an on time baby. That night our first chick hatched! We arrived the next morning to see a black little fuzz ball in the incubator.  How exciting! Then we noticed a chip in another egg and there went my plans for the day! We set up the document camera so everyone could watch the miracle of birth on the big screen.  The other first grade sections piled into the classroom and we just watch and cheered this little lady (hopefully) on as she chipped and wiggled her way out of the shell.  WOW!
After all was said and done, we ended up with 6 chicks and it took 3 days for them all to hatch.
Turns out first graders aren't any better at naming chicks than 2 year olds. Each section got to name a chick and the other 2 were named by our literacy specialists. While we were voting, I had to discreetly throw out Blackie, Baby, Little Lady and Honky. You can't make this stuff up, I swear!  One child told me "I have chickens at home and my favorite one is Pecker." Seriously parents, Pecker?! Not in my classroom or coop. We came up with Autumn, Chicken Little, Peeps, Maybell, Daisy and Midnight.

A Few Baby Pictures

The crew

fresh hatch

Proud Parents

It was going to be a wild last 2 months of school with 6 baby chickens in the room.  I'll let you know how it turned out!