Chickens: Easy, Entertaining – and You Get Eggs
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. In the middle of winter there is less light, so you will get few eggs, otherwise you should get eggs every day. For about 24 eggs a week, 4 chickens will be fine.
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 like worms and grubs, will eat tiny insects and bugs as well as grass and weeds, so they are pretty much self sufficient if they’re left to roam. Chickens that feed naturally produce eggs with lovely deep yellow yolks.
Laying hens needs layers pellets, plus a little grit for egg shell production and whatever treats you like to give them – such as a little corn. You can feed them on kitchen scraps too.
Chickens are very interesting animals, and particularly enjoy taking a bath in dry soil or sand, fluffing up their feathers and wriggling around to help get rid of mites and clean their feathers. They are also fond of sunbathing and love to lay sideways in the sun and get the rays to their outstretched wings.
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. This clear book with three sets of chicken coop plans also has comprehensive information on keeping cickens. Included are clear plans for a tall square hen house and large chicken coop with space for about 15 birds.
You should find chickens will lay up to the age of 4 or 5, but they can live until they are 15. Chickens will come to you and will gather round the coop in the evening waiting to be let in, they are more intelligent than you think.
Chickens may nibble at strawberries and tomatoes, and take a shine to some of your best blooms, so keeping them in a run for most of the day may be sensible. 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.
They will need to be let out of the roosting area early in the morning as soon as it is light as the more daylight they get the more eggs they will lay as they need natural daylight to produce eggs.
Mary Marshall
