First Coast Pet

Posts Tagged ‘keeping chickens’

Chicken arks give your hens new ground every time they are moved so do they still need to be fed grit? Whether additional food will be required?

These are some of the top questions about chicken arks. Chicken arks are simple triangular shapes that have a covered roosting space and nesting box at one end attached to a wire-covered run. This gives the hens an integral run and the ark is portable, so your chickens are protected from predators and they get new ground every day – a sort of enclosed free-range arrangement.

So the answer to the question is that if your chickens are on new ground every single day, the ground has plenty of plant life for them to forage on and gives them access to gritty or stony soil, this may be fine – and all your chickens will need is some additional calcium to ensure you get good strong eggshells.

To grind up and digest their food, chickens have to have grit in their diet. Birds’ digestion is designed so they swallow their food whole. The weeds, grass, insects and worms that they eat go into the ‘holding tank’ of the crop, then to a stomach wuth digestive enzymes which attack the food. The next organ is the gizzard which is tough and muscular. What happens is that the bits of grit and small stones that chickens scratch up help grind the food up in the gizzard.

If it looks as though the ground they are on will not give them enough, you can coolect additinal tiny stones and put them in the run. They love grit, so will eagerly snap it up. They should be tiny stones and hard gritty soil – and they’ll enjoy some more sandy soil to have dust baths in.

You can easily build a chicken ark yourself from plans and it works well if you have around three hens. Chickens will scratch ground bare, but if you move the ark every day they will not be able to clear it completely. You can let your chickens clear patches of ground completely, or you can let them fertilize areas by movng them on quickly!

Clear chicken ark plans and one free day is all you need for happy hens, protected but ranging free.

Keeping my own chickens has been a long time wish of mine. I finally found time and built a medium sized chicken coop. The plans I bought over the internet made the process really easy. The ad for the book about how to build a chicken coop said that a 15 year old could build it. I guess that was meant to be a smart 15 year old! I can use a hammer, a saw and a screwdriver and that’s about all you’ll need by way of tools.

I want to tell you a bit more about my hobby of keeping chickens – I do it just as a hobby, not professionally, and see if I can help you to make some decisions if you’re thinking about keeping chickens in your backyard.

There was a time when chicken was a meal for a special, celebratory occasion. Today of course chicken is very common and hardly special at all. Raising chickens in batteries or factories has provided plentiful and therefore relatively cheap meat, compared to the cost of other meat. The way chickens are raised in batteries is also a major reason why I keep my own brood, in my own suburban backyard.

If you’ve ever seen a battery hen in a chicken factory you will know what I am talking about. The cruelty these birds have to endure for their whole life is nothing short of a disgrace and a blot on our conscience. I had seen enough cancerous, deformed and deranged hens, picking at their own and others flesh out of sheer madness, that I stopped eating chickens and eggs for quite a while until free range products became readily available.

Then I discovered that free range did not always mean what I thought it meant – what it is supposed to mean – and I decided to keep my own chickens in my own chicken coop.

I did not intend to go on a crusade against chicken farms here so let me tell you of some other very good reasons to keep your own chickens.

Fairly obviously, the eggs and the meat come in real handy. The eggs from a truly free-range chicken are nothing short of spectacularly delicious. The yolk is not that washed out colour of a battery egg from a chicken pumped full of estrogen and growth hormone. Instead, it’s a bright, vivid yellow/orange colour with an absolute burst of flavour.

I know some folk who made the mistake of giving their birds names so they will never slaughter their chickens for the table. I keep my birds anonymous so that I am not emotionally distraught when I slaughter them. Real free range, home reared chickens have meat that is quite different to a supermarket bird. It’s plump and has a taste that is just outstanding. The skin roasts to a delicious crispiness. I don’t know exactly how and why but it’s just markedly better tasting than a supermarket bird. The additives in the chicken feed must have an effect on the quality and taste of the meat.

The freshness of the meat and eggs from your backyard brood is a contributory factor to the improved taste of course, but the biggest influence on the taste of the products is the absence of chemicals in the birds diet. Chemicals fed to battery raised chickens destroys the natural taste of the eggs and the meat. The chemicals, by the way, also find their way into your system and so you have also probably ingested female hormones and steroids with every egg and piece of chicken you’ve ever eaten. The fishmeel additive in the chciken feed of factory birds affects the flavour of the meat.

In times like these when most people are trying to save some household costs and also trying to be more environmentally responsible, building a chicken coop and keeping your own chickens is a fairly substantial step in the right direction and it’s very easy to do. So, I guess the environmental impact is another good reason to have your own birds.

The fertiliser produced by the chickens is fantastic for your garden. Gardeners can save money using a non-phosphate laden fertiliser that comes naturally from the chickens.

Since the kids moved out there is often leftover food in our refrigerator that goes to waste. Well I should say used to go to waste because the chickens love leftovers. We don’t feed them onion or garlic but all other foods are welcomed by them. Not just leftovers either, but peelings and cuttings as well. They are little fertiliser factories taking the scraps and the peels and turning it into fertiliser that enhances the plants and vegetables we have growing. It’s lovely to see the cycle of nature as it should be. I let them out of their enclosure to trim the lawn every so often. Like little lawnmowers!

Some people consider their chickens as pets, and for them that is a true benefit of keeping chickens. For me – well I don’t see the chickens as anything other than foodstuff.

If you build the right chicken coop for your intended number of chickens and for the location then your chicken coop becomes a pleasure to maintain. Make sure thats easy to clean and well ventilated. Well looked after chickens produce more eggs.

Now, what about building the chicken coop itself. Building a chicken coop is easy using only basic skills. Any handyman could easily do this. That’s about it. The plans I eventually bought are step-by-step type plans so it was easy to follow. I was fortunate to choose a book of plans that also had other very valuable and useful information in it. Such as: where to place you coop, how to ensure that it doesn’t get too hot in the chicken coop and how to construct a coop that is easy to clean. Also, the book  contained advice on how to choose the correct type of bird for your area.

This is very good value from a book that only costs about $30. I paid very little for all the material I needed for my chicken coop at a local salvage yard. I built a medium sized chicken coop for under $200 and there is a local (major) hardware outlet that sells what I think is a lesser product for over $950. I saved a packet. My $200 investment was returned to me in under 6 months just on the value of eggs produced. By the way I keep 10 hens and I get 6 to 8 eggs every day. I sell 2-3 doz eggs a week and although I charge almost double the supermarket price, I have no shortage of eager customers!

You can buy the book that I used on the internet for only $29.95. Just click here. I really found it to be very useful – exactly what I needed. You get it as an instant download, as soon as you pay. The online payment process is 100% secure.

That’s it. I hope that this information was of some help to you and I hope you enjoy building your chicken coop as much as I enjoyed the task of building mine. It’s a good thing to do and the upside is substantial. Have fun!

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