Silkies are pretty cute

We like to have animals on the farm who are useful (except the dog obviously) and not just cos they are cute…

The silkies don’t look much in the way of useful, as they are small and don’t have proper feathers. But they  are very useful chickens. They are super broody and good at raising chicks, I am hoping them will help with the incubation, but more importantly the keeping warm of young chicks, we shall see…

Because they don’t have proper feathers they need better protection from the weather than other chickens. They have been super sweet so far..

As with breeding any chicken you need to consider what you will do with extra roosters, they are difficult to sell and you can only have a small number compared to the females. We plan on eating the extra silkies as we do the other breeds, there is something interesting through about their meat that it is black! Not just black skin, black right through the flesh and the bones and even the organs. Very interested to see how they taste!

Punk chicken!