chickens

Why Chickens?

Chickens are wonderful pets! They are fun to watch, extremely useful, and regularly produce true superfoods (eggs) for our health and enjoyment. They also are highly independent pets, requiring an average of an hour per week of work with the right kind of system.

Managing chicken manure is perhaps the most important part to get right. They poop alot! Much of it is while they are perched up in their coop, so unless you want to be scraping out chicken poop on a weekly basis, we recommend the following coop design:

This design allows the chicken wastes to fall through the coop onto a thick layer of straw below. This is called the Deep Litter Method.

The Deep-Litter Method

• The ground of the chicken house and chicken run is covered with 8-12 inches of mulch. More mulch is added every month or so to keep the smells down.  Straw works well and is often easy to get in quantity (contact nearby stables or horse racetracks), but you can also use leaves, grass clippings, and dried weeds
•  The manure falls directly through galvanized wire into the mulch below
• It is essential that chickens have access to their manure! They eat the fly larvae to keep fly populations down, and their thorough scratching aearates and dries the manure so odors don't develop,
• Mulch is removed as little as twice per year for use in the garden as compost

Coop Design

• While chickens should be allowed to spend the day outside their coop in the yard, garden, or chicken run, they need a coop for nightime shelter.  Coops protect chickens from predators, the rain, and the cold (in very cold climates)
• Each chicken should be given at least five square feet of coop space and one foot of roost
• Good ventilation is necessary in hot areas.
• Chicken wire is useless for protection...it keeps chickens in, but predators can easily get through it.
• Spend a little more for hardware cloth, which is strong enough to protect chickens from dogs and raccoons. 
• Always lock your birds in their coop at night! It it can be opened by a 4-year old child, it can be opened by a racoon.

Feeding Chickens

• Chickens are omnivorous, eating plants and animals
• Their favorite foods are seeds, grains, cockroaches, worms, maggots, oats, watermelon, weeds, and greens
• Much of their diet can be kitchen scraps and dumpstered/recycled food
• Feed them discarded, rotten produce that humans won't eat
• You can grow them clover, comfrey, amaranth, dandelion, siberian pea shrub, borage and a variety of other plants for them to eat, or place your coop under a super-productive fruit tree to let them clean up the fallen fruit and fruit flies.
• Chickens love worms! Place cardboard on the ground to attract worms and then turn it over for them after some time, or feed them excess worms from your worm bin

For more info and to find answers to your questions, join the message board at www.backyardchickens.com