Do I buy the first eggs on Ebay that I see and stick them somewhere warm, wait a while and see if anything hatches? Do I buy an amazing £500 incubator that does everything I can possibly want (not that I know what I want, yet) and be assured that as I've spent so much money on the incubator, my eggs will certainly hatch and I'll have chickens soon? Do I buy every book under the sun, research this for months, only to realise that my chicks won't hatch until December, thus they'll be very small in very cold weather and might not survive?
When I get an idea in my head, I'm usually quite impatient and usually want to do it NOW - When my colleague at work agreed to take any chicks that I hatched, I immediately started researching how to hatch chicks and naively thought it would be easy. I'm sure it is for the 'seasoned pro' or the farmers who have broody hens and let nature take its course. However, as I'm neither a farmer, nor a seasoned pro, I was unsure as to where to get advice and what to do first.
I decided that the first thing I needed to do, was to choose a good incubator and after looking online for a few minutes I realised very quickly that those things aren't cheap! As I'm not in this for the money and I'm not keeping the chicks, I thought that spending a few hundred quid on an incubator (no matter how amazing it was) was slightly stupid, especially considering I'm not rich and still have a lot of student debt to pay off! So, I started researching the small incubators that were about £50-£80. The first thing I realised was, most of the smaller, cheaper ones seemed to need manual turning - therefore YOU need to make sure you turn the eggs yourself, every day (preferably an odd number of times - minimum of 3 times a day). This means that for 18 days (you don't turn the eggs in the last 3 days as this could damage the chicks) you have to make sure that your social calendar is free enough to allow you to turn your eggs.
The incubator I have chosen is the 'Brinsea Mini Eco 10 Egg Incubator' which I bought from Ebay after reading the reviews from various websites. Apparently it has had a lot of success with first timers and can be used to 'educate children' - well, I don't have a very big ego and if it's good enough to teach children where chickens come from, then it's probably good enough for me to try and hatch chicks! As I'm writing this blog before even putting the eggs into the incubator, I can't vouch for it in any way - however I'm hoping in less than a month I can say how good it is (fingers crossed). It was less than £70 and holds 10 eggs - quite enough for me and hopefully few enough so that I can focus on the chicks when they hatch.
If anyone is interested in the 'spec' you can find it here, at the Brinsea website.
http://www.brinsea.com/products/mini.html and here, http://hatchingchickeneggs.org.uk/brinsea-mini-eco-and-mini-advance-incubators
I've read a lot of reviews from various websites and people seem to have been able to hatch chicks, first time (although I'm not totally naive and perhaps only the good reviews are accepted and posted on their website?)
As this incubator doesn't have automatic egg turning, I'm going to make sure that I am available every day to turn the eggs. I'm also going to print out a spreadsheet with various columns and every time I turn the eggs, I'll mark it down, along with the day number and the time (I'll work this out exactly in a few days). The temperature has to be constant and as the Brinsea incubator has a thermometer, this shouldn't be too hard to monitor.
I ordered my incubator on Friday last week, so I am hoping that when I get back tonight, there is a Royal Mail missed delivery so I can pick it up tomorrow morning!
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