Keeping Chickens

Well the ‘girls’ have arrived and in anticipation of this ‘keeping chickens‘ site, we’ve already compiled a few chicken related posts and photos, in an attempt to answer the question of; why did we decide to keep chickens in our back garden?

We haven’t entered into this chicken keeping relationship half heartedly, no indeed! My wife has been threatening us with the idea for about a year, slowly attempting to chip away at my ‘no more animals’ policy.

There’s also been a certain amount of appealing to my stomach - the promise of fresh eggs from our own chickens I must admit has softened my initial reserve.

You see, if it was down to my wife we’d have a menagerie, fortunately for the dog (Pip) and I, natural wastage has meant that the pet numbers have dwindled in our household over the last few years.

Pip has been ‘ruling the roost’, so to speak; by the looks of things though with the new chicken arrivals, (with the kids at least) Pip is about to get ‘knocked off his perch’… Ahemmm!

Scattered around our house you’ll find battered and dog eared chicken keeping books. There’s even a few copies of ‘Farmer’s Weekly’ lying around. These books and magazines have been bought, begged and borrowed; they range from the ancient, to the more up-to-date chicken keeping methods for the modern chicken keeper!

One of these books inspired my wife to attempt to get me to make a chicken house. For those of you who may not be aware, my DIY skills are legendary - in the ‘badness’ stakes. Anyhow undeterred by this, my wife and I had a relatively swear word free Sunday afternoon attempting to make a chicken house.

Well what actually happened was my wife started making the chicken house whilst I was sitting in the dining room reading the Sunday papers. She’d dropped a few hints about chicken house construction and I’d ‘failed’ to take the bait.

Anyway, my wife knows that there’s one way to get a man to to some DIY, it’s by ’shaming’ them into doing it. So she’s wondering around the garden dragging 6 foot lengths of marine ply behind her, moaning about how she’s six months pregnant and shouldn’t be doing manual labour… Just loud enough for the neighbours to hear.

So I give in and go out and start making this chicken house. A couple of hours later, we have a pretty good looking ‘box’. It looks nothing like the chicken houses in the chicken house plan book, it’s a box with a weather proofed lid. It starts to rain and we come inside, we then forget about chickens and chicken houses for another day.

A few days later, my wife tells me that we’re now getting a ‘tailor made’ chicken house. She’s been looking on the internet and there’s a few chicken houses for sale on ebay and the like.

This duly arrives flat packed and surprisingly is pretty easy to make - even with the help of a 4 year old and a 18 month old.

My chicken house box construction thingy is now apparently going to be a outside toy storage box!

By the next Wednesday, my wife has sourced some local chickens for sale, and before we know it we’re all going to ’see’ the chickens.

Of course see actually means ‘buy’, so we’re picking four of them up and taking them home with us - the dog cage and cardboard boxes should have been a give away I suppose!

We bid our farewell to the chicken sellers, after taking advice on not feeding them, putting them straight to bed when we get home, and keeping the chickens in the confines of the ‘run’ attached to the chicken house for the first few days - so they ‘get to know’ their new home.

They also mentioned that as our chickens are 16 weeks old, it may be another 4 or so weeks before they start laying any eggs and earning their keep!

We release the chickens into their new chicken house and we are now officially keeping chickens! The releasing part wasn’t as bad as I thought, the chickens had ‘hunkered down’ in the box and felt soft, warm and sleepy when I picked them up to transfer them in to their new chicken house.

The next morning, my two sons wake up extra early to let the chickens out of their bedroom into their ‘play area’ - as our son Toby, who’s four calls it.

One thing I can say about keeping chickens, (with my vast knowledge of one day’s worth of chicken keeping experience under my belt!) is that if you’re the kind of person who finds themselves staring at open fires, then chicken keeping is going to be equally mesmerizing for you!

I love staring at open fires, there’s something hypmotising about watching the flames dance in the air. Well watching chickens is exactly the same. I can see that keeping chickens is going to cost me a lot in time spent ‘day dreaming’!

To make matters worse, I work from home and my office is the wooden structure that you can just see to the left of the chicken house. I’m going to be so close the chickens, that chicken watching will be a great daily temptation!

So that’s it for the the first chicken keeping post. I now plan to keep this site up to date with regular updates, so watch out for further chicken keeping posts.