Chickens in Your Garden – A Highly Rewarding Hobby
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. For about 24 eggs a week, 4 chickens will be fine.
They need somewhere dry to sleep and and nest boxes mean you know where they have laid their eggs, as most chickens will lay anywhere if left to their own devices. Simple hen houses or portable chicken arks are straightforward to build yourself. 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. They’ll eat kitchen scraps as well.
You’ll enjoy watching your chickens take a dust bath; first creating a shallow pit in dry soil or sand, then wriggling around and flapping their wings to stir up the dust and clean themselves. If it’s sunny, you’ll often find them lying on their sides with wings oustretched to catch the warmth.
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. Included are clear plans for a tall square hen house and large chicken coop with space for about 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. 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 will peck and scratch freely if you let them out, so you might decide to keep them in a run at least part of the day, so your plants don’t get too badly nibbled. 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
