A good chook house design doesn’t have to be complicated

If you’re planning to build a chook house the good news is that if you’re basically competent with a hammer and some nails it’s not hard to do. You do need a good chook house design to start with however, because just like building a house if you try to do it without a plan to work from it may not work out too well.

We covered in some other articles some of the things you need to consider in a good chook house design. You need to allow for nesting boxes,XXX roosting perches and places for food and water that will not become fouled from chicken droppings.

The good news though is that a simple chicken house design is quite adequate. Your chook shed doesn’t need to be complicated, ours is just a simple wooden shed with some thought put into where to put the components.

We were taken by the design of the chook house in the video. Obviously this guy has put some thought into how he will design his chook house, and in our view it works very well. But you don’t need to get quite this complicated unless you want to.

However as we said, it doesn’t have to be complicated. A simple chook house design always works well.
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You’re all set up for your chickens but you don’t have any

We’ve talked at length about the benefits of keeping chickens. All of those wonderful free range eggs in the fridge, all the benefits of chicken fertiliser to the garden, how much the kids will love them and how interesting they are to have around the house.

So now you’re convinced. You’ve spent some time learning about chicken houses, you have sourced a good henhouse or built one yourself, you’ve fitted it out with roosts and nesting boxes and food and water and you’ve decided whether you’re going to allow your chickens to free range around the garden or range in their own chicken run.

You’re all ready to go. Now you need to get your first chickens, but where do you get them?

It’s much easier if you live in the country of course however even if you live in the city there are plenty of places where you can source chickens. And whether it’s the country or the city it’s always much harder to get good laying hens than it is to get roosters, in fact you can probably get a rooster or 10 for free.

It is entirely possible to buy day-old chicks. It is unlikely that you will get all females, and you will need to hand rear your chicks yourself. We have done that ourselves and it’s a lot of fun but it’s also quite a bit of work.

Or if you’re really serious about getting chicks you could even buy an incubator and hatch them yourself. There are companies which will send you an incubator together with fertile eggs and post all these to you so you don’t need to leave the house. We have also done that and I can tell you the kids take huge delight in watching the chicks hatch through the lid of the incubator.

Or else you can buy your hens as point of lay pullets, in other words hens that are almost ready to begin laying. Young hens begin to lay around 16 or 17 weeks.

If you get online you’ll find places where you can source all of these things. Alternatively try the Yellow Pages for some chicken clubs, called poultry clubs, give them a ring and they should be able to help out with some suggestions. And there are chickens shows where you can make some good contacts and learn much more about keeping chickens as well just by talking to the exhibitors. Read the rest of this entry

Make your chicken house safe or a fox will take your chooks

Unfortunately life for a chook can be a little dangerous. There are plenty of predators that are happy to eat a tasty chicken including foxes and wild and domestic dogs. And cats. And more.

So when you’re building or buying a chicken house how do you make it safe for your chooks?

There’s a few things to think about. The first is the height of the fence surrounding the chicken house, assuming that your chickens are allowed out of their house during the day to roam outdoors.

In our experience chooks can fly reasonably high. At a guess a chook can clear a fence that would be 5 feet high. Of course it depends on the individual chicken.

You can attempt to limit their ability to fly by clipping their wings however in our experience this is successful only occasionally. We have had chooks with 2 wings clipped that can still fly to some height.

Therefore if you are seeking to keep your chooks within the run all this day you should make the surrounding fence at least 6 feet high.

Having said that the fence around our chicken run is no higher than 3 feet, and we can step over it comfortably. Some of our chickens fly over each day and free range around the garden and although we live in the country and have plenty of foxes we have never lost a chook to a fox.

Provided you always ensure they are back in the chicken house at night. And you need to check, because they will return 99 percent of the time but 1 percent of the time they will not.

It’s also worth knowing that unless you protect the fence around the chicken run a fox will dig underneath it. Foxes will always dig rather than jump. Although as noted our fence would be no barrier to a fox who wanted to jump over it we have never had a fox in the chicken yard in more than 10 years of keeping chooks.

But you must protect your fence from digging foxes. You do this by digging about 6 inches of the chicken wire into the ground, folding it horizontally outwards from the base of the fence and covering it with soil so that once the fox starts to dig he will encounter chicken wire and be forced to stop. Read the rest of this entry

How do you raise chickens to be the perfect pet?

We’ve spoken on our website before about keeping chickens as pets. Normally people would keep chickens because they are productive and useful to have around. But today we wanted to look specifically at how to make sure your chickens are a good pet, particularly for the children.

There’s no doubt children love pets. Ours adore their chickens along with our other pets. However there is nothing quite like having a pet that will sit on your lap and curl up at night with you to sleep on your lap.

Now you can’t really get chickens to do that can you?

Yes you can. It’s not easy and you can’t do it with all chickens but its perfectly possible to get chickens which are as good a pet as a rabbit or a guinea pig and which will happily sleep on your child’s lap in the evening.

Here’s how you do it.

You need to start with young chicks. Preferably day-old chicks. You will need to provide housing for them with warmth and feed, so you will need to research a little about raising chicks.

It’s not hard, we do it all the time, with a simple box in the laundry with a light bulb suspended above the chicks for warmth. You start with a 100 watt bulb for maximum warmth then gradually replace those lightbulbs with bulbs of a smaller wattage as the chicks get older.

That will not, of it’s own, produce chickens that will be the perfect pet for children. What you need to do is to spend time every day with the chick, treating it as your pet.

We did this very successfully with a silky bantam hen which we raised from hatching in an incubator which we borrowed. Every day from day one my 9-year-old daughter took that chick from its box, kept it on her lap whilst sitting on the couch and patted it.

Once it was older it was completely tame and would run up to her and stand on her shoes whenever it saw her. It was happy to be picked up and cuddled and if you sat down it would snuggle in your lap. Read the rest of this entry

Tips on chicken house size, and more

If you’re building a chicken house for your chickens you need to make a few basic decisions before you start building. The first of these is how many chickens you plan to house and what size your chicken house should be.

Whilst it varies from situation to situation a rough rule of thumb is that chickens require around 4 square feet, or about 60 centimetres by 60 centimetres, space in the chicken house.

This is a minimum and of course more is always better. And this varies enormously depending on whether or not the chickens are able to exit the chicken house during the day.

If your chickens are housed only in the chicken house all day then it is important to have the absolute maximum amount of space available in the house. If you have built or purchased your house for your chickens already then start with a small number of chickens in relation to the size of the house and see how they cope.

We house our chickens in a shed that would be roughly 2 1/2 metres square. We have about 15 chickens and this is entirely adequate, however they also have a large run for daytime use and only enter the chicken house to sleep at night and to lay eggs, or if it’s raining.

The rest of the day they spend their time outside. This of course means that the chicken house need not offer them stacks of space, because they are not in it often.

It is also important to make sure your chicken house has ample ventilation. Chicken coops that have no ventilation can lead to sick chooks.

When I built our chicken coop I made sure that the top half of the door had chicken wire, and the top half of one wall, (on the eastern side so that rain rarely gets in), also had chicken wire. This allows breeze to get in and out, thereby ventilating the chicken house.

Good ventilation is important. Read the rest of this entry

A good chicken house must have a roost for the chooks

Just like people chickens like to sleep at night. And just like people they have their favourite bed. Unlike people their bed allows them to sleep upright.

You see chickens sleep standing up. To do so they need to be able to stand on a perch, which is usually housed in the chicken house. Some people are unsure about why there are these horizontal bars in chook sheds, and that’s the explanation.

We’ve been asked how much space a chicken needs to roost on, and what size the perches should be.

Generally speaking your average backyard chook needs somewhere around 8 to 10 inches, say 200 to 250 centimetres, on which to roost. Ours have way more than this however if you look at them at night they are usually all snuggled up together, and one end of the perch is empty. So this distance of around 8 inches is ample.

If you have bantams for instance 5 or 6 inches is probably enough, but if you have some of the larger breeds including meat birds you would need to allow a little more.

What width perches are required? The chickens stand on the perch and so if it is a wide flat surface they cannot grip with their toes. Our perches would be slightly narrower than 2 inches wide, and our chooks seem quite happy with this.

It is important that the perch be lifted above the ground. It is not sufficient merely to lay rods on the ground. Chickens have probably have been bred, over many generations, from wild birds that would sleep in the branches of trees, and the instinct of perching above the ground is still strong. Chickens prefer to sleep above the ground, and although no one knows exactly how high, at least 12 to 18 inches would be the minimum at our guess.

It also important to remember that chickens will still poop whilst on their perch. So you’ll find that a pile of chicken droppings will build up directly underneath the perch. For this reason it is important to ensure that your perches are not placed directly above anything else such as food or water, otherwise these will become contaminated. Read the rest of this entry

For a small number of chickens a portable chicken house works well

Here’s a good video showing you a great portable chicken house. It’s only suitable for a small number of chooks, it won’t work for dozens of chooks, but a small chicken house like this one is fine for 2 or 3 chooks.

The beauty of this type of chicken house is that you can move it around from time to time. Chooks scratch around, and so if you leave your hen house on the same patch of grass all the time it won’t do the grass any good at all.

So move it around every few days and it won’t harm the grass, in fact it will benefit it from all the droppings left behind.

Of course you can always allow your chooks to free range in the garden during the day, just don’t forget to put them back in the hen house at night, and close the door.

There’s foxes everywhere.

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You’ve got to laugh at this video of a chicken house with an automatic door

I just love chooks, and had to put up this video about an automatic opening door on the chook house.

If you’ve got a chicken house with that many chooks why not have an automatic door?

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