Cute Chicken aka C.C.

 

 

C.C starts it all! But lets go back for a second so I can tell you how I got into chickens.

 

Tom had chickens before but didn't have any at the time we got together. One day he say to me let's get chickens. I say sure, Ive never had chickens before, What do you do with chickens. Eat the eggs he tells me, Ew that's gross, do you know where that egg came from. There is no way I am eating those eggs. Where do you think the eggs from the store come from he says. That's different, I say. I don't see it coming from the back end!

 

So off to the feed store we got and get 4 ( I admit it ) cute Rhode Island Red chicks. OK, I can do this, they are adorable after all. Well day one with those chicks that he put in our bedroom in a cage with a heat lamp and I was ready for them to go. Chirp chirp chirp all-night-long! The next day they moved to the living room :)

When the chicks got old enough to move outside, I tell him lets get a rooster, He says sure so we found a RIR rooster and brought him home to live with the girls. OK they were kind of cool having around the yard, following us around all over. Still wasn't eating those eggs though.

 

The RIR's have now grown up and are giving us far more eggs then we know what to do with since I'm not touching them. We take a trip down to the feed store to get hay for the horses one day and there is a brooder full of baby chicks. These are black and I ask what kind they were. I was told Black Sex Links. So yep, you guessed it, 4 more came home with us. I was having fun just playing with chickens. This was new to me and kind of fun. This time though the chicks started out in the living room with their cage and heat lamp and we got along great. I handled them a lot and made them very friendly. The RIR's were never keen on getting to know us, therefore not that sociable.

Soon it's time for them to be introduced to the others through a separate run but where they could see each other. Eventually the sex links were set free and all went mostly well. The RIR girls still weren't thrilled with them but the rooster was just fine. Since I had them tame I continued to pet them and hold them so they would continue to be sociable with us UNTIL that rooster decided that he would not tolerate me touching HIS girls any longer and attacked me, not once but twice. Well being new to chickens, that scared the heck out of me and I said he had to go! So he did!

 

The following winter was a bad one for Texas. Lots of snow and ice and sadly we lost a few girls in the process. We ended up placing the others and had no more chickens. I was okay with that. I still wasn't touching the eggs :)

 

About a year went by and off to the feed store we go for hay and supplies. By this time Ive gotten to know them there very well and my very dear friend Ronda says to me, come here you have got to see this!! So I follow her outside and lo and behold there sits this very small, very very fluffy black little chicken. She tells me it's a Silkie. "Ive heard of those and seen pictures, those are so beautiful! I have to have this baby and why do you only have one?" She tells me a guy brought it up there because his dogs had attacked all the baby chicks and this one was the only survivor and he didn't want it.

 

So I reach in and pick up this tiny ball of fluff and take it home with me. I am in Love!!

This small baby is so very friendly and so sweet, she climbs into my lap and wants to take a nap and doesn't want me to far from her at all. I was hooked.

I kept trying to come up a perfect name for her but nothing ever seemed to fit so she became C.C, short for cute chicken. Well she was!

Silkies are like potato chips, you cant have just one and as much as I was enjoying have this tiny fluff follow me everywhere, I was convinced she needed some friends. So I jumped on Craig's list and found a breeder not to far from me who had several silkie chicks for sale. I took the trip over and came home with 4 new friends for CC. 2 white and 2 paint. I was in pure heaven, and now completely chicken crazy. And this is how it all began and how I started raising chickens.

 

Unfortunately, CC became very sick after only a month and she passed away one day while i was at work. I was devastated, but I will never forget that adorable little ball of fluff. She was my best friend and I owe my new found love of silkies to her.

 

We are now currently breeding and raising Silkies, Seramas and occasionally Easter Eggers.

 

Oh and yes, after 2 years of having chickens, I do eat the eggs LOL I finally got over it and learned that these were the best eggs I ever tasted.

 

Welcome To Taking Root

 

 

Welcome! Welcome! Welcome!

 

We are so glad that you have joined us on our new adventure into homesteading.

I'm Kelly and my husband Tom and I live on 2.5 acres in the small town of Rhome, Texas.

 

I met Tom 4.5 years ago and he already lived on this beautiful piece of land. Of course at the time I was a city girl and wasn't sure what to do with all this. He seems to recall me saying eww, mud! a lot LOL and refusing to go out back to feed the horses with him for that reason. I didn't do mud!

 

I have always loved gardening but never had the room to do much. My passion was mainly herbs. I loved to grow herbs. So I began with a very small area and planted just a couple of tomatos. I know, not herbs lol

The next year I started really looking at things and found an area I loved and turned into a good sized garden area with a picket fence, a pond and a small area for more vegeatables.

Then one day it hit me, if your going to have a pond, why not have a duck? So we got a peking duck. One duck became 2 ducks and now have Duck Duck and Gracie. Duck Duck started out as Daisy but she would so often walk around quacking and it sounded just like duck, duck, duck, duck, so her name was stuck. Now Gracie, well that duck trips over her own feet walking through the garden. Bless her ducky heart, she just is not graceful at all.

 

The following year, the garden bug was really settling in good and I decided that where I was growing our herbs and vegetables was just not big enough anymore. We had a huge dog run on the backside of the garden and I kept looking at it thinking that would be so perfect for my new garden. So project move the dog pen began and I now have a second garden :)

 

And this is how Taking Root was born. I was loving gardening so much that I decided why not share what we do. We could grow our own plants and sell them, a backyard nursery if you will. My wonderful husband built me a greenhouse and we began. We went over a million names and nothing seemed to fit. We gave a lot of thought to what we were doing and what we wanted and finally came up with Taking Root. That is what we were doing after all. We have a nice piece of land where we plan to live for a very long time, we were planning to get married so this is where we were laying down our roots. It fit!

 

We are a very small nursery at this time, doing what we can handle while also working main jobs. We grow mainly vegetables and herbs at this time. We do plan to expand into flowers, annuals and perennials, trees, and shrubs. We will eventually be offering seeds from our plants as well.

We do not use any pesticides on our plants and never will. We like to think of it as organic but will call it all natural :)

We have huge plans for Taking Root but a little at a time.

 

Well that is a little about us and how we got started. There is so much more to tell, but we will get to it. Thank you for following us into this exciting new journey.

Stay tuned.. Next post will be how we got started with CHICKENS!!!!