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Chickens: Easy, Entertaining – and You Get Eggs
By Dog Lover | May 8, 2009
Chickens are entertaining and easy to look after. They are rewarding to keep as they’ll entertain you with their clucking around, re-arranging the flooring material in their run and taking dustbaths. You should get eggs daily except in the middle of winter. Most chickens can lay up to 6 eggs a week so just keeping, say 4, can get you two dozen eggs a week.
Chickens prefer somewhere dry to sleep and nestboxes mean you will generally find the eggs, as they can lay in out of the way corners if you’re ot careful. Moveable chicken arks and simple hen houses are straightforward to build from plans. Chickens will eat grubs and worms, clear tiny insects and bugs and will eat grass and weeds too, if you leave them to roam. You’ll get lovely deep yellow yolks from chickens that feed naturally too.
Apart form a little corn as a treat, the essential food is layers pellets, possibly with some additinal grit to ensure the eggshells form properly. You can feed them on kitchen scraps too.
You’ll enjoy watching the chickens taking a dust bath, wriggling around in dry soil or sand to clean their feathers and get rid of mites. If you see a chicken on her side with her wings outstretched on a sunny day, don’t be alarmed, she will be sunbathing.
If you have three birds, two may pick on the third as they establish a pecking order, so four is often a better number.
Housing chickens is quite straightforward, a large rabbit hutch will take one or two, but it should be raised off the ground – they can manage a small ladder, to keep it dry. You can make chicken arks (the triangular section chicken coops that you move around) very easily. Try this excellent book which has chicken ark plans and instructions plus information on keeping chickens. It also has plans for a larger hen house and run – and if you’re really serious a large chicken coop for around 15 birds.
Although chickens can live till they’re 15, they will only lay when they’re younger, up to the age of about 4 years. They are surprisingly intelligent so you can train them to come to you – and they will recognize a routine; for example they will be waiting by the chicken coop in the evening to be tucked up for the night.
If chickens are allowed to roam, they will decide what they eat, which may be some of your flowers and vegetables, keeping them in a run for some of the day can be a good answer. The chicken ark which you can move every day or two, allows you to move the hens around your plot, giving them access to new ground, but keeping the chickens where you want them.
Chickens need daylight to produce eggs, so you will need to make sure they are let out into their run early in the morning.
Mary Marshall
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