Thankfully there are a lot more people now becoming interested in where their own food comes from, the quality and the availability of that food. There has been a massive upsurge in the interest in allotments and growing your own fruit and vegetables. Also on the increase is animal husbandry and where keeping chickens was something the old man did in the country or down the allotment, it is now becoming mainstream to keep a few chickens in your suburban garden.

This is goldie, a hybrid hen that is known as a goldline hence the name. When she arrived she decided to show the other chicken who was boss by pecking at her so the wife being the wife decided that her name was to be casserole..... Over the following months she [ the wife that is] has mellowed and now goldie has started laying eggs all is forgiven.

The chicken as we know of it today is thought to have been domesticated over the last 7-8000 years, mainly through Asia and the pacific regions. Its predecessors are thought to be from the Jungle fowl in particular the Red Jungle fowl although there is recent research that points to the Grey Junglefowl having some input into the equation.

A lot of the colour displayed in the current domestic chicken can be traced back to these large birds, with the males of the species having very colourful plumage.

The colourful male junglefowl's play no part in the incubation of the egg nor do they do any of the rearing of the young. These duties are taken care of by the female of the species and this is carried down through the generations to the domestic chickens. All junglefowl are predominantly seed eaters although the young birds will also eat insects from the jungle floor, again a trait seen in domestic chickens. This explanation is but a quick scan of the internet so if you are interested in the origins of the domestic chicken then please search on key words such as Red Junglefowl, Grey Junglefowl and the Gallus gallus genus.

We will pose the questions below and then attempt to explore them further to help answer them in general terms but all the opinions on this site are those of bsefsufficient and as such should only be seen as one piece of the research that you should do if you are going to have as trouble free entry into chicken keeping as possible.

Henrietta is the Durham   Black chicken on the left.

If you read the magazines, watch the TV or go online it is made out to be very easy to keep chickens in the back garden and get 100's of free-range organic eggs every day of the week with no effort or cost.

 
To that end we are going to look at keeping chickens here and ask some wide-ranging questions that you might not have thought of. These questions are not meant to be negative but then it is not in the interest of the chickens or indeed you yourself if you look at chicken keeping with rose tinted glasses...

So you want to keep chickens?

The first, of many questions to ask yourself is:

why?

Do you want to keep them as pets? As food (meat) or for providing eggs for your daily breakfast,cooking and maybe sale or barter to your friends.

I guess that there is nothing wrong with having them as pets but bear in mind that if you have foxes in your area the chickens WILL attract them and if your coup and or run is not fox proof, and many are not then sending the children out to collect the eggs unsupervised one morning might be a bit of a shock if a fox has been around.

If you are looking to keep chickens as food for the table as opposed to eggs then you will need to look for a meat based bird such as a Ross Cob. This bird was developed by the frozen food company Ross to be a prime eating bird. I can testify from personal experience that the Ross cob birds are a fine meaty bird and can be as much as 7-9kg in a very limited time of less than 9 months.

If on the other hand you are looking for egg production only then look for a hybrid bird. Goldie above is an egg bird as there is no meat on her if you pick her up.

Henrietta on the other hand is a meat bird and although she lays eggs frequently she will only lay around 320 eggs a year compared with an egg bird who will lay around 350 + eggs a year but when the time comes to despatch them to the next life Henrietta will be a good table bird. 

Anything with some Leghorn in it should produce eggs very well. Some of my favourite breeds are these breeds below but in no particular order. I don’t own all of these breeds but I do like them. Light Sussex, Leghorn, Black Star, Rhode Island Reds, Red Star, Barred Rock, Plymouth Rock and black rock.

Do you have space for them to run around and be carefree or is space a premium?

The vast majority of people if questioned will find battery caged birds abhorrent but many of those same people will not think about the correct size of coup or run if they were to keep chickens themselves. For instance how much space does each chicken need in the coup?

Don’t know ? 2 square feet? 3 square feet perhaps? How about the size of a piece of A4 paper? At present the size of a battery caged for a hen is roughly that of a piece of A4 paper… shocking or what. This leads us onto a pertinent question :

Do you want to have chickens that could be classed as free range or organic over the so called battery hens?

If so have you got the minimum space available for the correct classification? There is a lot of information as to the regulations in force, and enforced on the Defra web site http://www.defra.gov.uk/ and these are mamoothian in size so it will pay you to check out this government website for further information.

As a basic guide you can keep up to 9 large breed hens per square meter and still call them organic. For free range then you can keep up to 6 per sq m. You can also call them organic if you feed them food with as little as 10% of the contents being grown organically so if you are buying expensive "organic " eggs thinking that they are as organic as they can be then you need to do some checking.

Ask your supplier what food they are fed on and tell him or her why you ask and if they are genuine then they shouldn't have any worries about giving you the information. My chickens are fed on a proprietary 100% organic food and free range in my garden which is again 100% organic.

If you are going to keep a decent number of hens for eggs and planning to sell the surplus on to friends and neighbours then you will need to hold permits if you want to call them organic or free range etc. Also these permits cost a lot of money. Currently the cost is between £1700 and £2000 with ongoing costs of £400 to £500 per year thereafter.

I find it easier to know in my heart of hearts that they are raised in a "super"organic and free range manner because my hens have over 2 sq feet each in the coup and full freedom of the garden during the day which is nearly 2500 sq ft but I don’t plan to sell the eggs or birds.

I prefer to avoid the complications and give them away. I have designed my  coup to be 2.4m long by 1.2m wide by 1.2m tall. That will give me a floor space of 2.88 sq m or 32sq ft. A breeder will allow 1.5sq ft per bird[free range] but many breeders who allow 2sq ft per bird find that they have little or no problems with illness or parasitic problems. After all a 8ft x 4ft coup will accommodate 16 birds at the 2ft per bird so if you want more than 16 birds then you don’t need to be reading these pages…

Do you have the commitment to keep chickens ?

This is not a flippant question but more of a question about you and your habits. Do you find yourself getting bored of things and often look out for new things to do ? If so then chickens may not be for you in so much as they need to be fed and watered EVERY day so holidays are out of the question or do you have someone to look after them while you are away.

Some people take their dogs on holiday with them, I know we did. Some put the dogs in kennels but you can do neither with chickens when you go on holiday.

I’ve just had a Fawlty Towers moment trying to sign in with a dog, two rabbits and 16 chickens in tow… I know I'm a chicken whisperer but this could be a step too far.

Chickens are not noisy creatures but they do need to be let out in the morning and locked up safe at night as they don't like being out of the coup when it comes in dark . They need feeding and watering and whilst auto feeders are available would you want to leave the birds for 2 weeks or more to fend for themselves??

If you are aiming to keep the chickens at your residence then have you mentioned this to your neighbours and to your local council?

Again like the Defra guidelines there are guidelines and rules for keeping chickens at home. As this site can be seen all over the world the best advice is to ask at your local council offices for advice. It also depends on the type of birds and what they are kept for. In bselfsufficient HQ area,

if you keep chickens purely for egg laying the rules are that you do not need to inform the council if you keep 4 birds or under but you do if you keep 6 birds or over. The officer who was talking to us didn’t know what we had to do if we had 5 birds…… One of the reasons you need to keep the councils sweet is that they like to know where birds are in the case of H1N1 outbreaks and the likes. If you don’t keep the council informed then they will slaughter the birds if there is an outbreak but if you can prove to be thinking about bio security and this is shown in your coup / run design then they tend to look kinder on small coups. In my designs for coups and runs that will be free to copy from this site they will pay particular attention to bio security.

If you are keeping birds for meat I.E. the dinner table then a whole raft of serious legislation comes into force and we mean serious. It all stems from the BSE crisis and the destruction of waste products such as the brains and innards etc.

Have you looked in your house deeds to see if there is a covenant on the property that allows or even prohibits the keeping of fowl?

My house deeds allows the lawful occupations of solicitor, banker and dentist to work from home. It says nothing about chicken keepers though.

Then there comes the questions about illness and well being. If a chicken gets ill you may still have to take it to the vet and this is expensive. There are also questions about worming, antibiotics, vitamins and other associated products you need to keep your chickens healthy.

Have you thought about the shelter that you will need to provide for the birds and the cost of this and also the cost of the run?

Do you have the skills to make a coup for your birds?

I will be including plans for a selection of coups on the site with dimensions and costing that you can use free of charge providing you mention you got them from this site.

 There are any companies who now provide accommodation huts and runs for chickens which are like designer homes. You might see a nice looking little hut made out of plastic with a small 1m run no more than 30cm high but did you know chickens like to jump?

Although they cannot fly like other birds they do like to have space enough to jump in the air and this is not practical in a small space less than the size of a bale of straw, well in my humble opinion it isn’t.

What about running costs of food, additives, light, heat, straw etc?

We have 4 birds at the moment and they can eat for england !! We feed them 100% fully organic chicken pellets and these cost around £16 a sack which for four birds will last me around 51 days. That means they will eat around 2 bags of feed per year, pre bird. There will be times when you need to buy grit, some straw maybe some tonics and worming potions which are not cheap. All in all I worked out that keeping 4 birds in luxury has a cost of around £50 per bird per year.

Always have clean water and watch how much they drink, which will be in the region of 150mls to 250 mils a day per bird. Grit is also important as it helps digest the food in the crop and oyster shell grit is good for forming the egg shell of new eggs.

DO Not give them your old egg shells unless they have been virtually burnt black in the oven as it makes them go on to eat the new laid eggs.

It is true that many hens go off lay in the winter so you still have to feed them with the alternative being that for the first year you only buy the birds in the spring as point of lay birds but you will need to bear in mind that the price of new birds in spring are generally 25% to 30% more expensive.

Do you need a cockerel for eggs?

You don't need a cockerel for eggs unless you want to incubate your own chicks or have a broody hen do it for you and having a broody is a pain in the bottom as it sets them up against the others and lasts for weeks. It is supposed to be 21 days of broodiness but the last one I had went on for over 7 weeks.

The only quiet cockerel is a dead cockerel ! I got a call from the environmental and public protection department of my local council the other day. They said that they had received a noise complaint about my cockerels. The only thing is I don't have any cockerels in my garden. The council asked if they could inspect and I agreed but I also said that the complainant who is well known for complaining lives near some allotments.. No further action was taken.

The upshot is that one of my near [ and I use that term loosely because she is two streets away ] neighbours had phoned the council saying I had 2 cockerels in my garden and they were "going off" at 4 am in the morning.

How many birds can you accommodate in one nesting box?

The simple answer is one when she is laying. The more nest boxes you have and the bigger they are the better it is for your birds. I currently have one large 4 ft x 2 ft x 2 ft nest box but it is sectioned off in two but the birds take turns to wait until one has finished so they can go in the same side of the nest box.

Pests and diseases

Diatomaceous earth is a good all round pest killer and delouser but you will in the lifetime of your chickens have course to buy a lot of medication for various diseases that are common in chickens. HAVING SAID THAT, if you look at all the diseases chickens can get you wouldn't bother keeping them in the first place and as such you will miss out on many hours of fun watching the antics of your birds. It is also a must to know that Hens are flocking birds so should never be kept as a sole bird and if a seller is happy to sell one bird on it's own even after he / she knows you have no other birds then you should, in my opinion buy elsewhere.

Do you want to rescue battery hens that have had a horrendous life or pay for fresh birds that are point of lay ?

In an ideal world we would not have battery caged hens and all would be free range and organic. Sadly the food we want at a price we want means battery caged birds will be around for some time. As such you will be able to get these reject hens from battery farms at about £1 each but they will be emaciated, featherless, disorientated and scared to name a few things.

In my opinion you should pay the extra money of up to £10 -£15 per bird and buy good quality, point of lay hens from a good dealer.

Another question to ask is

How much do you think a basic set up going to cost and how many years will it take to pay back your “investment”

If you buy a ready made coup and run you are likely to be paying over £300 for a small and often poorly constructed piece of furniture. If you have the technical ability then it is by far the best option to make your own des res for your birds.

Even then the cost will not be cheap but it will be cheaper and better quality which should last you  lot longer than many shop bought ones.

We will be putting up plans for our coup here that you can copy so long as you let people know where you got the plans from.

Of course there is nothing better than going down the bottom of the garden in the morning and picking up a couple of fresh eggs that are still warm to the touch and taking them back to the kitchen for breakfast.

This is a picture of my first coup nestling in the trees of my garden. It's a 1.22m cube

in size and has 4 birds in it at the moment. There are plans afoot to double it in size and turn it on to the back wall of my neighbours potting shed and then the run will be increased to 4m x 6 m.

The second picture (left) is that of the 4 birds nestled down for the night. In order from the camera you have Goldie, Red, Speck then Henrietta, the matriarch and Gestapo chick. Henrietta is hiding behind speck in this photo but she is there.

As of the 20th of September Goldie is no longer. We keep our chickens as something like pets without losing sight of the fact that they are semi wild animals as well. Because of this we have become used to their behaviour and antics so when one is not up to their usual mis behaving we notice over and above their usual twice weekly check up. Goldie wasn't herself on the evening of the 19th but being old she does spend some time in the nestbox but by the morning of the 20th she had developed an open sore and was riddled with Maggots. Sadly it was time to say goodbye. Goldie was an old chicken when we got her and she had stopped laying a long while ago. We reckon she was well into her 4th year so in chickens terms that was a long life. She certainly had a happy life with us and a longer one that that she would have had if she had stayed at the place we bought her from. RIP goldie and thanks for the eggs....