How to Reserve Chicks
As chick season gets going, so do the waitlists for specific breeds. We have two ways to help you get the chicks you want: The Reservation System and the Notification List System.
Option A: The Reservation System:
Pick your date(s): Take a look at the hatch schedule to see when the breeds you want will be hatching.
Make your appointment: Go to the appointment setter and set an appointment to pick up your birds. Your appointment should be no sooner than the day after the hatch day and no later than a week after hatch day, that is, if the hatch is on the 3rd, set an appointment for any day between the 4th and the 10th. The chicks need a little time to rest up between adventures.
In the notes section of your appointment requests, tell me how many of which breed you wish to reserve and what you would like as a substitute.
When I get your request I will put you in the queue for that hatch or those hatches. If your spot is near the end of that queue, and we don’t have as robust of a hatch as we were hoping for, you will go to the front of the line for the next hatch and be notified via an Appointment Rescheduled email.
Alas, we have had a harsh run of no-shows which is frustrating as other families are waiting for those chicks. To encourage better communication when plans change, we are now collecting payment information with the reservation and will charge for being ghosted. If you have to cancel your appointment because plans and circumstances changed, it is easy to do that from the Change/Cancel button at the bottom of your cancellation email. And there is no charge for that. We will only charge the credit card on file for those who just don’t show-up. Sorry it has come to this.
Option B: The Notification List System:
This is the less reliable system.
Go the to breed page of the birds you want. If I have none in the website inventory when you visit, you will be presented with the option of signing up to be notified when I add some to the website inventory.
When the breed you want hatches, I fill all the orders on from the Reservation System first and then I add the chicks that are left to the website inventory. You — and everyone else on the Notification List — will be notified and the first one to purchase the chicks off the websites gets the birdies.
a Flower Feather Farm flock
Swedish Flower Hens evolved naturally in Sweden, living off the land without human influence: a landrace.
Skånsk Blommehöna aka Swedish Flower Hens lay cream-colored eggs and are good foragers, good predator avoiders, and oh so pretty. They come crested and uncrested and hailing from snowy Sweden, they are unfazed by our rainy PNW winters.
They will lay for 8 or 9 years and their eggs are a pretty pale peach color.
Someone recently asked me why, specifically, I love them so.
How do I love them? Let me count the ways.
1) I love the visual diversity of the flock.
2) I love the endless delicate coloring variations of the chicks.
3) I love that they are predator-savvy. The roosters are always the first to call alert and even the SFH babies in the brooders respond, whilst the other chickies bumble about obliviously.
4) I love that, if I raise them together, two roosters will peacefully share a flock -- this can happen with other breeds, yes -- but it is consistent with the Swedes.
5) I love that they originate from Sweden as did my forebears. My great-grandfather was a child coal miner in Sweden prior to emigrating to the US at 23.
6) I love that they are easy-keepers. Lice and mice, intestinal worms, bumble-foot etc. are rarely found in my Swedish Flower Hen coop.
