Don’t be a chicken: time to put your eggs in one
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Chickens are a great addition to any household looking for entertaining eco-friendly pets, not to mention providing you with the best eggs you’ve ever tasted. The good news is, establishing and maintaining a chicken coup is actually a lot easier than you think.
Keeping chickens in the backyard is rapidly becoming one of the latest trends in suburban sustainability. Along with a veggie patch, herb garden and compost bin, having your own chickens is a great step towards producing your very own, fresh food at home. And for good reason – home laid eggs are tastier, fresher and more nutritious than any factory farm eggs available at your local supermarket.
For families with kids, chickens are also enormous fun and can often become very tame, loving pets. There’s nothing better than having chickens in the backyard to teach kids about handling animals and responsible care. And they’ll be fighting over who collects the eggs each day!
Getting started: egg-citement!
Once you’ve decided to adopt some feathered friends, it’s time to think about how many and how much space you have to keep them. For the first three years of a hen’s life, it’s not unusual for them to lay one egg a day throughout the warmer months. Four hens will therefore produce on average three or four eggs a day during peak laying season. If you don’t manage to eat them all, you’ll find friends and family to be happy recipients.
Although you can often find young chicks at your local pet store, it’s best to contact a local farm or chicken breeder who can advise you on the different types of breeds. That way, you can make sure you’re getting hens rather than roosters. Although most councils are happy for people to have chickens in their backyards, roosters are forbidden in suburban areas thanks to their early morning (or all day) crowing.
One thing to note, chickens don’t start laying eggs til they’re roughly four months old. So don’t be tempted to go for the baby chicks - no matter how cute they are. Point of lay chickens will cost you around $15 each.
Housing
If you’re not an expert carpenter, don’t worry – chicken coups are easy to build and just need to be weather-proof and predator proof (the chicken wire needs to be buried into the ground to deter foxes). If you prefer, you can buy a fancy ready-made chicken coup at your local farm shop or regional garden centre – or even over the internet. 
General guidelines state that each chicken needs roughly 25cm of perch 60cm off the floor, a minimum of 60cm square for shelter and 1m square of run area. They also need a cosy nesting box or two.
If you’re planning to let your chickens run around the garden, even just in the evenings for a couple of hours (beware of the veggie patch), then a smaller-sized coup isn’t a problem. If you don’t want to let your chickens run around, then it’s a good idea to incorporate a chicken run into your coup design. This could just be a fenced off area down the side of the house or behind the garage.
Chickens are homebodies at heart and you’ll find that they instinctively head home to roost once it gets dark, so there’s no need to worry about rounding them up every evening.
Feeding and cost
One of the best things about keeping chickens is that they eat pretty much anything – most household scraps can be given to them to boost their diet and the quality of their eggs. Their staple diet however should be specially formulated chicken feed at roughly $20-25 for a 20kg bag which you can buy at your local pet store. 200g per day per chicken is the recommended amount. Either give it to them by hand in the mornings or buy a feeder so they can feed themselves. And they must have access to lots of fresh water.
Chickens need cleaning out once a week so you’ll also need to invest in some straw or a block of sawdust to keep in the shed or garage. Although it can get a bit smelly, chicken manure is great for the gardens.
Rent-a-chook
If all this sounds a bit too much like hard work, there are companies such as Sydney-based Rent-a-chook which have sprung up in response to the new chicken keeping trend. Rent-a-chook will provide you with everything you need – chickens, coup, feed – and if after six weeks you’re not happy, you can return the lot!
For a whole wealth of chicken keeping information, head to the website www.rentachook.com.au
Happy chooking
