>> Funding for this series has been provided in part by Manna Pro.

>> As much as we count on them... >> They count on us all the more.

>> To nurture their lives... >> With the same commitment.

>> Manna Pro -- nurturing life.

>> And Meyer Hatchery.

>> Meyer Hatchery offers more than 160 breeds of poultry and carries a full line of feed, supplies, gifts, and decor.

With nearly four decades of experience, the Meyer family is committed to supporting our customers through their entire poultry journey.

Learn more at MeyerHatchery.com.

♪ ♪ >> This is such an exciting time of year here in Maine.

After being cooped up all winter, everybody is so happy to just be outside, getting exercise, getting fresh air, and just enjoying spring in Maine.

♪ This time of year is really bad for predators.

We've seen hawks teaching the juveniles to hunt.

So, I really don't feel comfortable leaving the chickens out unless the dogs are outside with them.

With more hours of sunlight, some of our older layers are starting to lay again.

And a few of them have decided to be broody, so they're gearing up to be moms.

>> [ Clucking ] >> Today is going to be an exciting day on the farm.

We have some baby chicks coming.

So, I'm going to set up their nursery, and then I'll share a couple different brooder ideas with you.

We're going to talk about broody hens.

I have a quick-and-easy DIY to share.

Then I'm going to head into the kitchen and share a recipe that a friend just showed me that I know you're going to love.

[ Chicken clucking ] ♪ I'm Lisa Steele, author, blogger, and fifth-generation chicken keeper.

I live in rural Maine with my husband, flock of chickens, ducks, and geese, Winston the corgi, and Linus the indoor/outdoor barn cat.

We moved to Maine for the peace and serenity.

We wanted a simpler life and to step back in time where there are still corner stores and your neighbors still know your name.

Welcome to my farm.

[ Chicken clucking ] ♪ [ Chickens clucking ] It's a beautiful day, and I'm waiting for the phone call from the post office that our baby chicks are here.

So it's the perfect time to set up your brooder for them, either the night before or first thing in the morning when you're expecting them.

You want to have everything ready before they arrive.

So I like to use this galvanized tub.

For five or six chicks, this is going to be perfect for the first week or two.

They're obviously going to grow.

So, you're going to need something bigger.

You could use a plastic tote.

I like to use a puppy playpen.

But for just starting out when you first get them, if you just have a couple, something this size is going to be perfect.

So, you're going to want to put something in the bottom of it.

Newspaper alone is too slippery.

They can't get a good grip on it.

Their legs can start to spread out, and they'll end up with something called "spraddle leg," which you don't want to have to deal with.

So, you want something that they can grip.

I like using the rubber shelf liner.

It's nice and grippy.

Any water they spill goes right through it down to the newspaper underneath.

And then it's super easy to clean, because I just take it out, throw out the wet newspaper, hose off the shelf liner.

I usually cut two the same size, put the new one in with new newspaper.

So, that's what you're going to have on the bottom.

So, before the day that your chicks are coming, you're obviously going to want to get all your supplies ready.

Again, they're babies, so you have to set up a nursery for them, same as if you were bringing home a real, live human baby.

You want to make sure you have everything you need.

So, you're going to need feeders and waterers for them.

There is these kind of traditional either glass or plastic gravity feeders and waterers.

If you only have a couple chicks coming, these are kind of big and clunky.

They tend to tip over.

So, I experiment with different things.

And this year, I'm trying this.

I found some little espresso cups, secondhand.

And I epoxied the cup to the saucer.

And I figured these would make really cute, little water dishes.

So I can pour the water in here.

You want the chicks to have room-temperature water, so you do want to get the water set up well in advance of the chicks coming.

You can add some sugar to it.

Just gives them a little boost of energy after their long trip if they've been shipped.

Or you can add some electrolytes to it.

And then you want to put some little rocks into the water.

Chicks drown really easily.

So, if it's anything that's not really shallow, you want to put some little stones in, so in case they fall in, they won't drown.

But I thought this would be really cute.

And the saucer will kind of contain their water mess.

So, I'm going to put two of them in there.

You want to make sure that there's enough water for your chicks.

And I give them water 24/7 when they're this small, and food.

So, that's their water.

Then for food, you can use the bottom of an egg carton.

Again, there is traditional feeders for chicks.

But you can save some money and just put some chick feed into the bottom of an egg carton.

And then when this gets wet or dirty, you can just throw it away and use another one.

I've done this before, and this works really well.

So, that's their feed and water.

So in the top of the egg carton, you want to save that, and you can fill it with some dry dirt or sand.

Chicks even a couple days old will practice dust bathing.

It's really good practice for them.

It keeps them busy.

Keeps them from getting bored or pecking at each other.

And -- whoops!

-- and they can eat some of this too, and it'll be grit that they need.

So, I like to always give my chicks a little dust bath.

And I have this little roost that I actually made for them out of an old drying rack, clothes-drying rack.

By putting in a branch or something else they can hop up on, again, it gives them practice for being adult chickens.

Keeps them busy, a little enrichment in the brooder.

This is actually kind of big for this.

But when they get a little bigger, maybe I'll put this in for them.

But even just a little branch -- I like to put a branch or something on that they can perch on and practice balancing.

Then, because these chicks don't technically have a mom, a feather duster in the brooder.

I'll tape it to the side or secure it to the side so it doesn't fall.

But they like to go underneath it.

And it's kind of comforting because it's like a mom, looks kind of like a chicken, with the feathers.

And I'll just get all that set up.

And even the night before, like I said, you can get it ready well in advance and have it ready for when your new babies come home.

Just before a chick hatches out of the egg, it ingests the yolk of that egg.

That yolk gives it all the nutrients it needs for the first 72 hours.

So, that is how the chickens survive the two-day trip without eating or drinking.

As soon as the post office calls, I'll go head over there and pick up my box of chicks.

They'll come in a cardboard box with nice holes for ventilation and filled with soft bedding.

Also, this time of year especially, they'll put a heat pack in that will keep them warm through their journey.

♪ ♪ ♪ [ Car beeps ] ♪ [ All chirping ] ♪ ♪ When you first get your chicks home, you want to give them a nice drink.

I like to take them one by one and dip their beak into the water, just so they know where the water is.

And then you also want to give them a quick check for pasty butt, which is a condition where they get stopped up and literally can't poop.

So, you have to clear that up.

Easily done with some olive oil and a Q-tip.

Not terribly common, but it's a good thing to check for when you first get your baby chicks home.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ [ All chirping ] ♪ ♪ I have got a trick that, if it works, is going to alleviate the whole brooder heat lamp in the house, and we're going to raise the baby chicks outside in the coop under a mother hen.

[ All clucking ] ♪ So, normally, I would try to break a broody hen.

I don't want them sitting on the nest all day if they're not hatching chicks.

But since I knew that I'd be getting some baby chicks, I wanted to make sure that one of my hens was really hard-core broody.

So, normally, you have a broody sit on eggs for three weeks till they hatched, but this is sort of like a workaround.

And I'm going to get a broody hen to sit on my shipped chicks.

You know a hen's broody when she's sitting on the nest every time you go down to the coop.

So, it's different than just being in there to lay an egg.

She basically is going to sit day and night.

When you approach the box, she'll start to growl.

You'll puff up.

>> [ Growling ] >> She pulls out the feathers, literally feathering her nest with the feathers off of her chest.

That also means that when she's sitting on eggs, her skin is right up against the eggs and keeps them warmer.

So, one of two things are going to happen.

I always like to do this during the day.

I don't want to do it just before dark, because I want to stick around and make sure that she's really going to take to the hens.

So, I'll just take the eggs out from under her.

She's been sitting on non-fertile eggs for about a week and a half now, I think.

It doesn't matter it hasn't been the three weeks that eggs take to hatch.

A broody hen just wants chicks.

She's not counting the number of days in her head.

So, I'm going to take the eggs out from under her, and then I'm going to take the chicks one by one out of the bucket and show them to her.

And I should be able to tell right away if she's going to be into this.

♪ ♪ [ Chicks chirping ] ♪ And if all goes well and all six chicks end up underneath her, then I should theoretically be able to just pick up the whole nest, the chicks, the nesting material, and mom, move them into the nursery.

And that's where they'll live until they're ready to join the rest of the flock.

[ Hen warbling ] Either she's going to be an insta-mom, or they're going to end up back in the house.

I learned pretty early on that it comes in super handy to have a movable nesting area, in addition to your nesting boxes, someplace where your chickens can lay that can be moved around.

Sometimes in the summer, it gets really hot in the coop.

Maybe you have a chicken who's sick and you want to separate her, and she needs a place to lay.

Or, in my case, I have broodies that I want to break.

Instead of tossing them out of the box continually, I just want to shut the coop, keep everybody out all day, and everybody else is going to need a place to lay their eggs.

Whereas if you have something out in the open, a broody is not going to tend to want to lay there because it's not super-secret and super-private.

So this is a super-easy project.

All you need is an old chair.

If you have an old bench, even better.

You can make a two-nest kind of setup for your chickens.

So, you just need an old chair and then some kind of pan or a container to use as your actual nesting area.

I found this nice metal pan that I'm going to use for mine.

To get started, I'm going to flip the pan upside down and trace the outline onto the seat of the chair.

Then with a jigsaw, I want to cut just inside that outline that I drew, because you need the pan to sit on its lip on the seat of the chair.

Once you've got your circle cut out, you can paint your chair, paint your pan.

And then set the pan in the seat of the chair, add some nice, soft bedding material, some dried herbs for a little bit of aromatherapy.

♪ And then just set your chair wherever you want your chickens nesting, whether it's in your run, in the shade under a tree, or under a bush.

I'm going to be putting my chair in the run, so I can close up the coop so the broodies can't get back inside.

♪ ♪ Finley and I are making a super-fun craft today.

We're going to make these little chicks that sit in egg cartons with some jelly beans -- great gift for a teacher or one of your little friends or to put on your Easter table.

So, the first thing that we need to do is put some grass into your egg cartons.

So we have all different-colored paper grass.

So, you can fill each of the little holes with some grass.

And then we have some cotton balls.

And Finley cut out some little beaks out of felt and eyes out of black felt that we're going to use to put onto our baby chicks.

So, then we take a cotton ball and glue -- here's the eyes and the beaks.

So, you can glue one of those onto your cotton balls.

And I'm going to make one, too.

We're just using toothpicks and some tacky glue to attach our little chick faces.

So, Finley's working on hers.

And then we went out to the coop and we grabbed some feathers.

Some of the ducks had dropped some little feathers.

And we're going to use these as tails for our baby chicks.

♪ Little chicken nest -- so cute, good job!

And there we have our little Easter craft.

And you can even close it up, and then when you give it to your friend or your teacher, there's a big surprise inside.

Good job, Finley.

♪ And when you first get started raising chickens, I always recommend that people start with baby chicks, because you just end up with friendlier chickens when they're older, and they are healthy from the start.

You know what they've been fed.

And it's the baby stage, like you want to have that excitement.

Over the last 10 years, I've done it a bunch of different ways.

I've gotten chicks locally.

I've had them shipped through the mail.

I've bought fertile hatching eggs and hatched those.

This year, I decided I was going to get the baby chicks, day old.

We already have a rooster.

Don't want any more roosters.

And when you hatch, you're basically going to get half hens and half roosters, and it can be hard to rehome extra roosters.

So, I went with the day-old baby chicks coming from the post office.

And when we got our coop, I had it sectioned off into a storage area and a sleeping area.

And under the storage area, I kind of put a built-in nursery, because I knew that nearly every spring, we get baby chicks.

And I wanted a kind of permanent place where I can have them in the coop.

But if you don't have a nursery built into your coop, there's lots of other ways to keep your chicks warm and safe until they're ready to join the rest of the flock.

♪ ♪ I recently had a friend come and visit from the U.K., and she showed me how to make Scotch eggs.

I've never had a Scotch egg before, but they were so delicious.

And what I really loved about them is that they're portable.

So, if you're running in for a quick lunch and you've got to go back outside to get things done, you can just kind of grab them and go and eat on the go.

And they include eggs, of course.

So, today I'm going to show you how to make Scotch eggs two different ways.

To get started, I soft-boiled some eggs.

I put room-temperature eggs in boiling water for 5 minutes and 45 seconds.

Then took them out, put them in a bath of ice water to cool and then peeled them.

Then I took two additional eggs and just whisked them, because we're going to need an egg wash for the eggs just before we bread them.

I'm going to pour some bread crumbs into a bowl, because that will make the breading on the outside of the eggs.

Next I'm going to take some pork-sausage meat.

One pound will make six Scotch eggs.

Then I'm going to add a little bit of pepper and a pinch of kosher salt.

At this point, this would be the filling for plain.

We're going to make maple-bacon and also jalapeño-cheddar.

You can make any flavor profile that you'd like.

You can make ranch or barbecue, mustard, and just add whatever fillings you want to your pork meat.

So, we're making maple-bacon.

So, I'm going to add a couple of slices of raw bacon.

And then I'm going to pour in a little bit of maple syrup.

This is local Maine maple syrup that we bought at a local farm on Maine Maple Sunday, which was a couple weeks ago.

Then I'm just going process it until it's all smooth and pureed.

[ Motor whirring ] And that looks good.

So, now I'm just going to wrap each egg in a little bit of this meat mixture.

It's really sticky.

So, the easiest way to do it, I was told, is to pat some of it into your hand, then take an egg, and then just kind of let gravity fold it over the egg.

And you want to make sure that you really seal the egg inside the meat.

Roll it in the egg wash and then put it in the bread crumbs.

And the trick that my friend showed me -- because this is kind of messy -- is you just kind of swish it around like that so your fingers don't end up in the bread crumbs.

So, that looks good.

And I'm just going to put it over here on a parchment-lined sheet and make the rest of them.

So, I'm going to put my thermometer into the oil, and when it comes to about 330 degrees, then we know it's ready for the Scotch eggs.

So, I'm going to make some jalapeño cheese.

I could use the same food-processor container.

I don't need to wash it out.

I'm just going to add the rest of the pork, sliced jalapeños.

You can use as many or as few as you want, depending on how spicy you want it, and then some shredded cheddar cheese.

♪ Same salt and pepper.

♪ And then blend that up.

[ Motor whirring ] And that's looking good.

So same thing, I'm just going to wrap each of the eggs in a little bit of the pork filling.

♪ ♪ I bet this would be really good with, like, pickle relish inside.

♪ Then into the egg.

And shake it around in the bread crumbs.

♪ So, I'm going to let those cook for six minutes.

♪ [ Sizzling ] ♪ They've been in here for six minutes.

So, now I'm just going to carefully take them out and put them on some paper towels to drain.

♪ [ Sizzling ] Since these are raw pork and raw bacon, you want to really make sure that they're cooked all the way through.

So, you're going to take a meat probe and just kind of get it down into the meat layer and make sure that you cooked them to at least 160 degrees.

♪ Well, I am super-excited.

They've cooled enough now to handle them.

I think my friend is going to be really proud of me because these came out beautiful.

The crust is a nice golden brown, really crunchy, and hopefully the inside is still orange, yolky goodness.

I'm going to cut one in half and see.

♪ So, these can be eaten warm or room temperature.

You're going to want to refrigerate them if you're not going to eat them right away.

And for longer storage, then they'll have to be frozen and reheated.

♪ We have a really short growing season here in Maine.

We generally can't plant seeds in the ground until Memorial Day.

So, it's really important to get them started in the house prior to that.

I like to use egg cartons and eggshells.

Any of these egg cups are biodegradable, so the seedlings can be planted right into the ground.

All I do is save my eggshell halves when we're done making breakfast.

Then use a pin and poke a small drainage hole in the bottom of each half.

Then rinse out the half and remove the membrane.

Once the eggshells are dry, I just put them into egg cartons.

Next, I'll use a spoon to fill each eggshell with seed-starter soil.

♪ I like to put at least three seeds into each eggshell and then cover them lightly with a little bit more soil.

♪ Then water each one.

♪ And set the cartons on a towel or tray and put them on a sunny window seal.

If your house isn't really warm, or if the air is really dry, you can cover the cartons with plastic wrap to create sort of a greenhouse effect and keep more moisture in.

Keep them watered so the soil doesn't dry out.

And in a few days, you should see your seedlings start to sprout.

Once the seedlings have their first set of true leaves, they're ready to be planted.

So just crush the eggshell a bit and plant them in the ground.

The calcium in the eggshell is really good for the growing plants, especially for those that like extra calcium, like peppers, tomatoes, and eggplant.

I like to keep a chart of which seeds I've planted in each carton.

It just makes it easier when it comes to planting time.

♪ ♪ ♪ Have I mentioned how much I like ice cream?

So, I was super-excited last summer to hear about a brand-new breed.

It's not an officially recognized breed, but it's a new breed that was developed, and it's called the Ice Cream Bar.

So, I got two of them last spring, and I can't wait to introduce them to you all grown up now.

♪ [ All clucking ] I wanted to introduce you to one of my Ice Cream Bars.

As I mentioned earlier, they are a crossbreed, half Swedish Isbar, half Cream Legbar, so, Ice Cream Bar.

So, super-clever name.

They're really smart chickens.

They're great foragers.

They're really good about keeping an eye out for predators.

They're not a great lap chicken, not like some of my other breeds, like the Australorps or really anything in the Orpington family.

These chickens are pretty nuts.

They're quick.

They're smart.

They don't really like to sit in your lap.

She's plotting her escape right now.

But they're great layers.

They lay blue eggs.

And they're really active, friendly.

They're not a problem with the other chickens.

They blend in well to the rest of the flock.

But if you're looking [laughs] if you're looking for a lap chicken, you probably don't want an Ice Cream Bar.

I am happy that I got them.

I have two.

One speckled like that, and one is solid black.

Their names are Chip and Josephine.

That was Chip.

But they really are good at free-ranging and watching out for predators.

They're cold-hardy.

So, they are a decent breed if you're not looking for really kid-friendly lap chickens.

♪ Well, I think we made really good use of all these daylight hours.

I love how long the days are here in the summer.

In fact, sometimes, I'm waiting for the chickens to go to bed so I can go to bed, because they're staying up so late.

♪ ♪ We talked about how to get baby chicks from the feed store or through the mail.

If you have a rooster, you can also try hatching your own chickens' eggs using an incubator.

Or if you have a broody hen, you can put some eggs under her for three weeks and they should hatch into chicks.

To do a quick check to see if the eggs from a certain hen are fertile, you just want to crack an egg into the bowl.

If you see the white bull's-eye on the yolk, that means her eggs are fertile, and those are the ones you want to incubate.

♪ If you're just getting started, it can be kind of daunting to raise baby chicks.

There are lots of different ways to do it.

I've shared a couple options, as well as what works best for me on my farm.

But everybody's situation is a little bit different.

The main thing is to remember they're babies, and they need to be kept warm, have plenty of food and water, and be kept safe -- if you just relax, have fun with it, spend a lot of time with them, and remember they don't stay little forever.

♪ ♪ ♪ >> Log on to FreshEggsDaily.com to learn more about poultry, backyard-farming techniques, recipes, or anything you may have seen in today's show.

Closed captioning for "Welcome to My Farm" is made possible by Grubbly Farms -- food for healthy pets and planet.

Funding for this series has been provided in part by Manna Pro.

>> To protecting them.

>> Helping them grow.

>> And thrive.

[ Chickens clucking ] >> Treating them... >> As well as they treat us.

>> Manna Pro -- nurturing life.

>> And Meyer Hatchery.

>> Meyer Hatchery offers more than 160 breeds of poultry and carries a full line of feed, supplies, gifts, and decor.

With nearly four decades of experience, the Meyer family is committed to supporting our customers through their entire poultry journey.

Learn more at MeyerHatchery.com.