Want To Keep Chickens At Home? First You Need A Good Chicken Coop.

There’s no doubt that everyone loves pets, and most of us love eggs too. And there is a wonderful way to combine your love of pets and eating eggs together. Why not keep chickens?

As all kids love pets they will also love chickens. I have chickens and I have kids and the kids are delighted with their chickens. They feed them and pat them and give them names. Chickens are cheap to feed, and if you let them out in the garden during the day they’ll eat those pesky bugs that are feasting on your flowers. They are also relatively easy to keep and don’t make lots of noise as long as you don’t get a rooster.

But before you buy some chickens you do need to think about housing them. You will need a good chicken coop to house your chickens. Let’s consider the ins and outs of chicken coops.

Of course you need to decide how many chickens you are going to have in your chicken coop. 3 or 4 hens is really quite sufficient to the average household, and if you are keeping this number than a simple portable chicken house that can move around the garden is quite sufficient.

The first thing you need to think about is whether there are any regulations governing keeping chickens or having a henhouse . In some places regulations specify what you can and cannot do.

The quickest way to get yourself a chicken coop is to buy one, however they are not that difficult to build provided you’re familiar with the workings of a hammer. Grab some treated timber suitable for outdoors, some chicken wire and a few essential handyman bits and pieces and it is not that difficult to build your chicken coup during an afternoon.

There’s some essentials when building a chicken coop, including a nesting box where the hens will lay their eggs.

As well as this you need some perches above the floor of the coop where thechickens perch to sleep at night.

A simple A-frame design is quite sufficient, and it’s also important to provide the chickens with some rungs spaced from one side of the chicken house to the other off the ground for the chickens to roost on at night. It is better that this part of the coop be under cover.

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.

During the day you can open the door of the henhouse to allow your chickens to free range around the garden eating the bugs that eat your flowers. But make sure all chickens are returned to the coop at night, with the door closed, or foxes will get your chickens.

If you’ve got kids they will absolutely love having chickens of their own, and will also appreciate the eggs to eat. But make sure, before you buy your chickens, that you do some research to establish what size your chicken coop needs to be to house the number of chickens that you are considering.

Grab that hammer and nails out of the shed, get started on a simple handyman project that you can enjoy doing with the kids, get yourself some chickens and then enjoy all those wonderful omelettes.