Want To Keep Chickens At Home? First You Need A Good Chicken Coop.
We all love eggs. They're wonderful to eat, nutritious and make a great omelette. And we all love pets. So why not satisfy your roots for pets and for eggs by keeping chickens, and eat omelette every day?
Kids just love chickens. Mine happily spend hours feeding them, picking them up and patting them and collecting the eggs at the end of the day. Chickens are cheap to feed and easy to keep. Provided you have only hens they don't make much noise and if you allow them to free range in the garden they will eat those nasty bugs that feed on your vegetables.
But before you head out to buy yourself some chickens you have to consider how you will house them. Let's talk a little about chicken coops .
Of course the first thing you'll need to consider is how many chickens you wish to house. If you'd like a box of eggs a day you'll need plenty of chickens, however for most families 3 or 4 hens is sufficient. If this is the case a simple movable chicken house that can be trundled around the garden is quite adequate.
There is also another thing that you need to consider before keeping chickens, and that is whether there are any regulations governing the keeping of chickens at your home, or about the chicken house that you are allowed to have.
The fastest and possibly the cheapest way to get a chicken coop is to build it, provided you're familiar with the right end of a hammer and you've got a few nails. It's not that difficult, you need some treated timber, some chicken wire and a few bits and pieces and you can have a chicken coop built in an afternoon.
There's some essentials when building a chicken coop, including a nesting box where the hens will lay their eggs.
At night chooks need to roost to sleep, so they need some perches above the floor of the chicken house to do so.
A simple design that is easy to build is an A-frame design. You can make the perches by running timber rods from one side of the coop to the other. Make sure that the perches are under cover so the chickens are out of the weather when sleeping stop
If you put handles on one end and wheels on the other it is then easy to move around the garden, and you move it every few days to fertilise different areas of the lawn.
There is generally no problem in allowing your chickens to roam the garden during the day, although it is important to make sure they have returned to the chicken house at night and to close the entry door. Even in the middle of the city it is possible to find foxes and foxes while a chicken for dinner.
Kids love keeping chickens and most of them love eating eggs, but remember that this basic work to do before you get started on your new hobby of keeping chickens. You've got to decide how many to have and either buy or build a good henhouse to house that number of chickens safely and uncomfortably.
All you have to do is get stuck into a simple handyman job building your chicken coop or buy a good one and then you can be comfortable knowing that you always have a fridge full of eggs.
