Are you ready to raise your own chickens and enjoy delicious home grown eggs? This is the last blog post in our series that asks an expert chicken lady about all there is to know. If you missed the earlier two posts, I strongly suggest that you go back and catch up. Just click on the links: Interview with the chicken Lady and Interview with the Chicken Lady 2.
What supplies do you need to raise chickens?
How do you house them? Instead of having a traditional coop or chicken house, I decided to make a more portable structure for them to live in. I ended up building a hoop house 5 ft by 10 ft from PVC pipe, hardware cloth, and plastic poultry netting. I covered it with tarps and a length of shade cloth. The materials for this didn’t cost much money, but it did take some time to assemble it all. Inside the hoop house, the girls have a large dog house to hide and sleep in. Sometimes they prefer to roost on top of it. Now the cold weather is here, they have moved into an 8 ft by8 ft greenhouse I built from a kit. They have their dog house in there, but they now prefer to sit on the benches and look out through the walls before going to sleep.
What is the hardest thing about raising chickens? The easiest?
They will eat just about anything and will dig up just about anything. They are very self-sufficient. I let them out in the morning, collect eggs, refill food and water dishes, and close them in at night (they know to go into the when it starts to get dark). a pigeon flew overhead the other day. One of them let out an alarm and they all quickly found cover and stayed there for quite a while. They know what they need to know.
Do you have children and if so, are they involved in caring for the chickens?
I don’t have children but, this would be a very educational project for them.
What do you wish someone had told you about raising chickens before you got started with it?
They can get a bit noisy sometimes, but it’s very brief.
Is there anything else that you would like to share?
Most of my chickens’ time is spent free ranging around my 1/5 acre yard, scratching the soil, and hunting for bugs or whatever else they want to eat. They also love just about any kind of kitchen scrap we bring them. Sometimes people will give overripe fruit which the chickens trill and happily cluck over as they gobble it up . They are very interesting little creatures.
Click here for more articles by Mary Ann Romans.
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