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

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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