Backyard Chickens

Raising chickens turned out to be a lot more fun than I imagined. I was a bit nervous at first because we were venturing into the unknown, but after a few months I realized it wasn’t going to be difficult. In fact, as they got older, the easier it got. Five years ago we bought our first batch of six pullets. All survived the first 4 years, but one by one they started dieing off for unknown reasons. No signs of distress, disease or injury. In fact, two of them…
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When I first built my coop, I figured 32 sqft would be enough space for a chicken run. I imagined some of our six hens would be inside, while others would be outside. Turns out, that wasn’t the case because the chickens like follow each other. When one goes out, they all go out. I quickly found myself needing a bigger run, especially when the chickens reached full size. I designed and built my chicken coop on my own, based on a rough sketch I drew on a piece of…
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So we’re a little over one year into our chicken experiment and I can honestly say, it’s been a lot of fun! It’s not nearly as hard as I thought it would be, nor as messy. As we gain experience, we learn what to be concerned about, and what’s normal. For example, our molting chickens stopped laying eggs about 2 weeks ago. I know they are molting, because it looked like a few feather pillows exploded in our backyard and inside the coop. Molting is the process whereby a chicken…
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Algae is a chlorophyll-containing, mainly aquatic eukaryotic organism, or more commonly referred to as the green stuff one finds in stagnant water. You can grow this stuff if you let water sit for awhile, especially if it’s warm outside and the water has sunlight shining on it. But most people don’t like it, and neither do our chickens. I’d grown tired of cleaning out the water bucket every week, so I needed to find a way to stop the algae from growing when the chicken water sits for a few…
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Chickens aren’t too particular when it comes to their bedding. In reality, it’s probably you who is more particular than the chickens because you are the one that has to clean up after them. However, there are some health concerns that need to be addressed, because the chickens don’t always know what is best for them. The bedding on the floor of the coop serves a few purposes; provide comfort to the chickens, make it somewhat easier for you to clean up the poop (unless you want to scrape the…
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Backyard chicken raising has become quite popular over the last few years, and I don’t think there is any one reason, but rather a few good reasons why. The reasons we did it are twofold; fresh healthy eggs and for the fun of it! First of all, eggs are not bad for you. They are very good for you because they are packed with lots of nutritional stuff. A few decades back, a war on eggs was waged because they were perceived as having too much cholesterol. Since then, study…
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