Spring-time Hatching
Melodie Weintraut
April 2025
The Good:
March marched on forever, and waiting for eggs to hatch was pure torture. But we stayed busy improving our poultry setup—my husband even built an amazing brooder off the side of our coop (he gets full credit for that one!).
I had a Nurture Right 360 incubator set up for my daughter’s 1st grade class using a mix of my own eggs and some local ones—silkie/serama crosses and Easter Eggers. The kids had chick prediction worksheets, a countdown, and even a daily development poster. It was such a fun experience, and luckily, I had a backup incubator at home just in case. Good thing too—because in early April, both incubators hatched successfully! The kids loved it, and honestly, I think I loved it more.
I’m proud to say that from those hatches, I sold every chick except for a few personal keepers. My family was definitely worried I’d be drowning in chickens, but nope—sold out!
Even better? I made a new local friend while picking up some eggs. That first visit introduced me to seramas for the first time, and I knew I wanted a pen of them. So now, for those keeping track:
🐣 Rainbow Eggers
🐣 Silkies
🐣 Seramas
I also picked up some local silkie chicks to round out the collection. And I have a batch of shipped eggs from Meyer Hatchery currently incubating—they arrived perfectly packaged (yay!). I know shipped eggs often only hatch around 40%, but during the final candling I only pulled 4—fingers crossed for a few more fluffballs.
Oh, and the littles got a new coop. 🐥 #Spoiled
The Bad:
I ordered chicks through the mail for the first time—and I won’t lie, it was awful. They were in transit for five days. I don’t think it was anyone’s fault… the world is just a little broken right now. But chicks aren’t meant to survive that kind of delay.
Sixteen of the twenty arrived DOA, and the last four passed away that evening. One even died in my hand. I’ve seen millions of birds in my life—but that one really hurt.
Also, my first serama hatch was rough. (Note to anyone wondering: I do not recommend the Sailnova incubator—it was a flop.) Only three seramas made it. I did get other chicks in that batch, but I’d been so hopeful for more seramas.
So—where are we now?
I’ve had four successful hatches and three incubators full of birds. I currently have three pens: Rainbow Eggers, Silkies, and Seramas. And let’s be honest… I basically have chicks available weekly at this point. 😂
It’s been a bit of a wild ride—but I’m really loving it. 💛
Time to Begin
Melodie Weintraut
March 2025
My world has been on fire since April of 2023. A lot of big life changes happened all at once. I always had a vision of what I wanted for our farm, but with a new baby, a new job with a lot of travel and a lot of time spent away, that dream felt unattainable.
In December of 2024 two things happened at the same time. First, I watched the Netflix documentary, “MARTHA” about Martha Stewart. There was a part where they showed one of her many gardens. It was in the front of her house, effectively the front yard, but it was so wild looking and so…beautiful. I couldn’t stop thinking about how I wanted to have a wild garden in MY front yard.
Now there’s a few things you have to understand about me. The first is that I’m already pretty proud of my little farm. We built it from the ground up. The horses have been home since the summer of 2017. The second is that I’m really good at chickens, like REALLY good. I really understand chickens and I’ve made poultry my career. I’m also very proud of that fact.
Some other important notes: I have no idea how to garden. None at all. Another is that I view time as the most valuable thing. Finally, I mostly want to spend time with my family and my horses. So, what’s a girl to do? In typical millennial fashion, leverage my hobbies and start a company of course!
Crickhollow (which went through MANY names in the last 8 years) has been a dream since we looked at the house for the first time with our realtor (Steve Parsons for anyone who is looking in the DelMarVa region). In 2024 I opened an LLC, but just wasn’t in the right head space to do anything with it. So finally, after 18 months of chaos, it was time to put real focus into making the farm HAPPEN.
Things seemed different at the end of 2024. I felt ready to try and mentally prepared to fail, but most of all I wasn’t afraid anymore. I wasn’t afraid to tackle the daunting paperwork (turns out you need a lot of certificates to do eggs, horses, and a farm stand–and I don’t even have all of them yet). I wasn’t afraid of my friends and family seeing all my social media posts and judging me. Honestly, the most powerful push was failure I had experienced at my previous sales job and what that failure taught me: I know what I like to be doing and I’m knowledgeable and good at it, poultry and horses
Where did I start? In January I planned. I planned my garden, I READ the back of every seed packet and made a spreadsheet about when things get planted. How they get planted. Do they need to go into the fridge? Do they need a cold start? It’s a beautiful spreadsheet. I’ll let you know how that goes in another post.
I tackled the stupid paperwork.
I talked to an accountant, I talked to the county, I talked to the Maryland Department of Agriculture, I talked to the Extension Office, I talked to my insurance agent, I talked to DNR, I talked to a soil specialist. I sought out people already doing what I am trying to do. I talked to everyone and anyone I thought I needed in order to get a clear picture of what I needed to do this thing right.
Talk to everyone. Even if you’re afraid of what they’re going to tell you, what new hoop you have to jump through, what new certificate has to be applied for. Talk. To. Everyone.
In February, I bought some Silkie chickens because I have always LOVED silkies. I also bought some Silkie eggs and an incubator. No time like the present to jump in feet first. I also brought in my “starts” because turns out when a packet says “start inside” they do NOT mean in your freezing greenhouse, but literally inside. So now we are incubating eggs and have a bunch of trays of plants in our master bedroom.
Through it all, I’m not discouraged or deterred. I look forward to 2025 and look forward to learning and growing and sharing the few things I have to bring to the table when it comes to chickens and horses and that’s how I know I am ready to DO. THE. THING in 2025.
Here are three takeaways:
- You will know when it’s time to start: For years I wasn’t ready to TRY to make the farm more than it was. After a failed attempt into my first foray in sales, I started to understand what failure looked like and how I could overcome it in different aspects of my life.
- DO your research: When you are beginning an undertaking like mine, jumping from doing a lot of things privately (horses, chickens, gardening) to doing things as a business, there’s probably going to be a lot of rules. You don’t have to know everything to START, but you don’t want to get too far into your planning and your action items before making sure you are on the straight and narrow with ordinances, rules, laws and liability. Getting a handle on these can save you a lot of headache in the long run.
- Closed mouth, closed business: Before my jobs in sales (turns out while I did fail spectacularly in my first job at sales, I CAN actually do it pretty well), I (like many people) wasn’t super fond of salespeople. This also affected how I talked about MY business with my friends and family. I was almost afraid/ashamed to market myself and my services. That was a mistake. You can absolutely go overboard, but just food for thought: it takes an average person 7 times to see your connect/reach out/marketing campaign before they even decide to consider making a purchase.