Posts Tagged ‘chicken coop’
Get Some Chickens And A Chicken Coop And You’ve Got The Perfect Productive Pets
Keeping chickens at home is a wonderful way to combine having pets the kids will love as well as something productive to add to the kitchen. There’s nothing like having your own organic free range eggs available every day.
But before you start looking to buy some chooks you need to find out a little more about what you house them in. They are generally housed in chicken coops, or what are sometimes called a henhouse or chicken house.
It doesn’t matter if you buy your chicken coop or build a chicken coop yourself. It’s quite cheap and not difficult to build a henhouse, it’s really not a lot more than a garden shed with some modifications.
There are a few specific things that you will need to install in your henhouse before you get your first bunch of chooks. They will need nesting boxes to lay their eggs, and to sit on those eggs if you let them build up, and it is worth having more than one nesting box even if you only have a small number of hens. Make them small so that only one chook can fit in the nesting box at one time or you will find 2 of them are battling for position at the same time to lay their eggs.
Make sure the nesting boxes are quite dark as you will find that if they are not dark enough your chickens will lay their eggs somewhere darker, like in the corner of the shed.
You will also need perches. These provide somewhere for the chooks to sleep, as they sleep standing up and off the ground. A simple bar, say 50 by 75 millimetres, a foot or 2 off the floor of the coop, with around 200 millimetres of space for each chook, and you’re good to go.
You will need food and water provided either in or outside the chicken house, however if it is provided outside you will need to ensure that any food left is not in the open so it will not get wet in the rain.
If you provide food and water in the chicken coop you will need to make sure that it is not underneath the perch or the chicken droppings will foul the food.
Once you have purchased your chooks you have committed to regular cleaning of the henhouse. You will need to lay a soft material on the floor of the house, such as hay or sawdust. My preference is sawdust, and over time it soaks up the droppings, but beyond a certain point must be cleaned out. However sawdust full of chicken droppings makes a wonderful fertiliser and if you spread it around the garden the plants will love it.
Collecting eggs every day is the best part of keeping chickens, and your own free range eggs always taste better than the supermarket variety. If you have too many just ask a few neighbours, there will always be some who will buy them from you.
So you can see there are good reasons for keeping chickens. As well as being wonderful companions for the children they also provide something useful for your fridge.
And there is little doubt that children love chooks, ours wouldn’t be without them.
So spend a little time researching keeping chooks and consider the type of chicken coop you will need, whether you will build it or buy it, where you will put it and how you will clean it, then get yourself some chickens. You won’t regret it.