What’s The Perfect Pet For A Family? Chickens

There’s no doubt that having a pet is a fine hobby for a family. But pets are not without their problems. It can get very expensive buying some pets and paying for the veterinary bills, extremely difficult to know what to do with some of them when you go away on holidays. Cats can devastate the local wildlife and dogs will bark at the neighbours and terrorise visitors.

But the perfect pet may well be chickens. They aren’t expensive to buy and they aren’t expensive to feed, they won’t bark at the neighbours, they don’t get sick often and if you organise it right you can go on holidays for a week or 2 quite easily.

And as well as that chickens are very productive providing you with a fridge full of wonderful free range eggs, and the result can be some delightful omelettes for dinner. There’s many reasons why chickens may be the ideal family pet.

And whilst it is true that you can’t sit a chicken on your lap to pat at night we still find that adults and particularly children adore chickens.

But like other pets you do need to understand a bit more about keeping chickens before you buy some. You will need to provide them with somewhere to live, called a chicken coop, or sometimes a hen house, or chicken house. You can buy one or perhaps the cheapest way is to build one.

Your chickens will sleep in the chicken house at night however they much prefer to roam around outside of the coop during the day time. It’s perfectly possible to let your chickens free range around the garden during the day cleaning up the bugs, though you may get a little scratching and pecking of your flowers.

One of their great loves is to peck at ripe tomatoes.

Or else you can provide a dedicated chicken run around the hen house where they can roam during the day.

It’s important, if you plan on keeping chickens, to understand some of the feeding requirements. To ensure an adequate supply of eggs they need plenty of calcium and protein. You can supply the protein from any source, though it’s possible to get dedicated high protein feed, and calcium can often come from shell grit added to their food. You will need a good feeding and watering device.

And going on holidays isn’t a problem. We can comfortably go away for one to 2 weeks after we have left our chickens with sufficient food and water.

Without doubt keeping chickens is a great way for the family and in particular the children to enjoy having pets. Although there is plenty to learn it’s fun and rewarding and the children will love having their chickens. So learn a bit more about housing and feeding them and then start looking for your first hen.

And then you’re on your way to a lifetime of healthy free range eggs delivered to you by some happy healthy hens.

What’s The Perfect Pet For A Family? Chickens

There’s no doubt that having a pet is a fine hobby for a family. But pets are not without their problems. It can get very expensive buying some pets and paying for the veterinary bills, extremely difficult to know what to do with some of them when you go away on holidays. Cats can devastate the local wildlife and dogs will bark at the neighbours and terrorise visitors.

But the perfect pet may well be chickens. They aren’t expensive to buy and they aren’t expensive to feed, they won’t bark at the neighbours, they don’t get sick often and if you organise it right you can go on holidays for a week or 2 quite easily.

And as well as that chickens are very productive providing you with a fridge full of wonderful free range eggs, and the result can be some delightful omelettes for dinner. There’s many reasons why chickens may be the ideal family pet.

And whilst it is true that you can’t sit a chicken on your lap to pat at night we still find that adults and particularly children adore chickens.

But like other pets you do need to understand a bit more about keeping chickens before you buy some. You will need to provide them with somewhere to live, called a chicken coop, or sometimes a hen house, or chicken house. You can buy one or perhaps the cheapest way is to build one.

Your chickens will sleep in the chicken house at night however they much prefer to roam around outside of the coop during the day time. It’s perfectly possible to let your chickens free range around the garden during the day cleaning up the bugs, though you may get a little scratching and pecking of your flowers.

One of their great loves is to peck at ripe tomatoes.

Or else you can provide a dedicated chicken run around the hen house where they can roam during the day.

It’s important, if you plan on keeping chickens, to understand some of the feeding requirements. To ensure an adequate supply of eggs they need plenty of calcium and protein. You can supply the protein from any source, though it’s possible to get dedicated high protein feed, and calcium can often come from shell grit added to their food. You will need a good feeding and watering device.

And going on holidays isn’t a problem. We can comfortably go away for one to 2 weeks after we have left our chickens with sufficient food and water.

Without doubt keeping chickens is a great way for the family and in particular the children to enjoy having pets. Although there is plenty to learn it’s fun and rewarding and the children will love having their chickens. So learn a bit more about housing and feeding them and then start looking for your first hen.

And then you’re on your way to a lifetime of healthy free range eggs delivered to you by some happy healthy hens.

Get Some Chickens And A Chicken Coop And You’ve Got The Perfect Productive Pets

Keeping chickens at home is a wonderful way to combine having pets the kids will love as well as something productive to add to the kitchen. There’s nothing like having your own organic free range eggs available every day.

But if you’re planning to get some chooks you need to consider how will house them. A chicken coop, or what is sometimes called a henhouse or chicken house, is where you house your chicken.

It doesn’t matter if you buy your chicken coop or build a chicken coop yourself. It’s quite cheap and not difficult to build a henhouse, it’s really not a lot more than a garden shed with some modifications.

The modifications that you will need are firstly that there are nesting boxes available in the chook house for the chickens to lay their eggs. Make your nesting boxes only a little bigger than the size of a chicken. If they’re too big you’ll find two chickens battling for position in the same nesting box. And make them easy to clean.

And it’s also important that they be relatively dark, as chickens like to nest in dark places, and if they aren’t dark they will choose somewhere darker, like the corner of the chicken coop.

As well as nesting boxes you will need perches for the chooks to sleep on, as they sleep standing up above the ground, as if they were on a branch. A simple bar around 75 millimetres by 50 a little way off the ground is sufficient, and allow around 200 millimetres of horizontal space for every bird.

Of course they will need food and water, which you can provide either inside the hen house,  or outside, as long as it is sheltered.

If you provide food and water in the chicken coop you will need to make sure that it is not underneath the perch or the chicken droppings will foul the food.

Of course some responsibilities come with keeping chickens, in particular cleaning the henhouse. You need a nice soft material on the floor of the henhouse, my preference is sawdust which soaks up droppings, though of course needs to be removed from time to time. And it makes a wonderful fertiliser put it on the garden.

The best part of keeping chickens is collecting eggs every day. Organic free range eggs taste better than supermarket eggs and you’re never left with too many as you will always find neighbours happy to buy them from you.

So there’s good reasons for keeping chickens as pets for the children. There’s many animals that make good pets are very few if any that provide you with a useful product to eat as well.

And chickens certainly are a fine companion for children, ours absolutely love their chickens.

But remember, spend some time researching about keeping chickens, put some thought into the type of chicken coop that you will buy or build, where you will place it and how you will clean it and your forethought will be well rewarded.

Get Some Chickens And A Chicken Coop And You’ve Got The Perfect Productive Pets

Keeping chickens at home is a wonderful way to combine having pets the kids will love as well as something productive to add to the kitchen. There’s nothing like having your own organic free range eggs available every day.

But if you’re planning to get some chooks you need to consider how will house them. A chicken coop, or what is sometimes called a henhouse or chicken house, is where you house your chicken.

It doesn’t matter if you buy your chicken coop or build a chicken coop yourself. It’s quite cheap and not difficult to build a henhouse, it’s really not a lot more than a garden shed with some modifications.

The modifications that you will need are firstly that there are nesting boxes available in the chook house for the chickens to lay their eggs. Make your nesting boxes only a little bigger than the size of a chicken. If they’re too big you’ll find two chickens battling for position in the same nesting box. And make them easy to clean.

And it’s also important that they be relatively dark, as chickens like to nest in dark places, and if they aren’t dark they will choose somewhere darker, like the corner of the chicken coop.

As well as nesting boxes you will need perches for the chooks to sleep on, as they sleep standing up above the ground, as if they were on a branch. A simple bar around 75 millimetres by 50 a little way off the ground is sufficient, and allow around 200 millimetres of horizontal space for every bird.

Of course they will need food and water, which you can provide either inside the hen house,  or outside, as long as it is sheltered.

If you provide food and water in the chicken coop you will need to make sure that it is not underneath the perch or the chicken droppings will foul the food.

Of course some responsibilities come with keeping chickens, in particular cleaning the henhouse. You need a nice soft material on the floor of the henhouse, my preference is sawdust which soaks up droppings, though of course needs to be removed from time to time. And it makes a wonderful fertiliser put it on the garden.

The best part of keeping chickens is collecting eggs every day. Organic free range eggs taste better than supermarket eggs and you’re never left with too many as you will always find neighbours happy to buy them from you.

So there’s good reasons for keeping chickens as pets for the children. There’s many animals that make good pets are very few if any that provide you with a useful product to eat as well.

And chickens certainly are a fine companion for children, ours absolutely love their chickens.

But remember, spend some time researching about keeping chickens, put some thought into the type of chicken coop that you will buy or build, where you will place it and how you will clean it and your forethought will be well rewarded.

Why Are Chickens The Perfect Pet For Children (and Adults) ?

The perfect pet for children, and for adults, is to keep chickens. Keeping chickens has a number of benefits including the provision of wonderful free range eggs for the fridge and the capacity of chickens to eat all those rotten bugs that are eating your flowers.

Some people assume that you can only keep chickens if you live in the countryside, but there are many people living in suburbia who delight in keeping chickens too.

The keeping of chickens is often subject to rules and regulations, for example it is often prohibited to keep roosters and there are also sometimes regulations about the number of chooks you may have and where your chicken house may be located.

But after you’ve found out what you can and cannot do there are no other reasons why dwellers of suburbia are unable to keep backyard chickens in suburbia.

Often I am asked what breed of chickens you should buy and how many chickens you should have.

This depends of course on your own choice, but a general rule is that a good laying hen will lay around 300 eggs each year, or around 5 or 6 a week, more in summer than winter.

You can then look at how many eggs you require to determine how many chooks to keep.

But it’s extremely rare that you should have eggs going to waste. If you do simply ask the neighbours, they will fall all over themselves to buy your free range eggs.

On that basis, for the average family, 3 or 4 hens is usually sufficient, though more is more fun.

And what type of chicken to buy? There are many breeds, and there are different ways to select your hens. Do you want wonderful looking chickens or are you just looking for hens that will produce as many eggs as possible? In our case our choice of breed is determined by both considerations.

Because there is no doubt there are some wonderful fancy looking chickens available. Our kids love fancy chickens and so we have some wonderful pure white silky bantams. They don’t lay large eggs so are really there for their looks.

But they do look great.

For egg laying we tend to select Isa Browns. These are a good chook for laying plenty of eggs, though one drawback of Isa Browns is that they rarely sit on eggs, so if you want chicks each year Isa Browns may not deliver. Their lack of enthusiasm for sitting on eggs is the reason they are good layers, because once they start to sit on eggs they stop laying.

Having chicks is a wonderful experience. Every time we do so our kids love it, and delight in watching the chicks grow up. There are some negatives to allowing your chickens to hatch chicks though, the main one being what to do with the chicks when they get older. Of course around 50 percent will be roosters and so you will need to find something to do with them. They make good soup, however you will need to consider the council regulations.

However these are small problems when compared to the delights of keeping chickens as pets, and also of having those wonderful, tasty and fresh free range eggs to eat every day.

Peter has a website about chickens and chicken houses at http://www.chickenhouses.net.au

Why Does A Chicken House And Some Chickens Keep The Family Happy?

The kids have been pestering you for weeks about getting a pet. You consider getting a dog but you know that the barking will annoy the neighbours. And you also know that you don’t want a dog pooping all over the garden. Cats are nice but they scratch furniture. Have you considered keeping chickens as the ideal way to provide low maintenance pets for the kids?

There’s a whole host of reasons why chickens make wonderful pets. They don’t bark, and provided you don’t buy a rooster the neighbours won’t complain about the noise. They don’t smell and they don’t dig holes under the fence. They’re cheap to feed, need very little work and are fun day at around. Kids just love chickens, mine spend hours playing with them.

And there’s an added bonus to having chickens. You get eggs.

Lots of people never think about getting chickens as a pet when it comes to choosing a pet for the kids. As long as your council allows you to keep chickens it’s well worth considering. But there are some things to think about before you rush out and buy your hens. You need a good chicken house to house your chickens.

The henhouse needn’t be enormous. If you only have 3 or 4 hens then a modest size henhouse will house them admirably provided it has a nesting area and rungs for them to roost on at night.

It’s not hard to build yourself a henhouse. It’s basically just treated timber (for outdoor use) and some wire mesh, and some materials to cover in part of the henhouse so they have some shelter at night. Usually don’t need a floor as it sits on the ground.

And a small henhouse for 3 or 4 hens, if you add wheels one end and handles the other, can be moved around the garden so that the chicken droppings can fertilise the lawn in different spots from time to time. And there’s no reason chickens can’t free range around the garden during the day.

It’s the perfect handyman project for you to do together with the kids. Buy some materials, grab a hammer and nails, round up the kids and spend the afternoon building a fine chook house for your soon-to-be chicken collection. The kids will love it.

So if you’ve been looking for a solution to being pestered by the kids for pets consider chickens. It’s a good way to you to show the kids how well you can build a chicken house, and you’ll have happy kids, happy chickens and lots of eggs for dinner if you do.

Find a good recipe book, get started learning how to make omelettes for dinner and not only have you found a solution to getting pets for the kids and show them your handyman skills but you’ve also made your wife happy making dinner with your own free range eggs.

Why Are Chickens The Perfect Pet For Children (and Adults)?

The perfect pet for children, and for adults, is to keep chickens. Keeping chickens has a number of benefits including the provision of wonderful free range eggs for the fridge and the capacity of chickens to eat all those rotten bugs that are eating your flowers.

Some people assume that you can only keep chickens if you live in the countryside, but there are many people living in suburbia who delight in keeping chickens too.

The keeping of chickens is often subject to rules and regulations, for example it is often prohibited to keep roosters and there are also sometimes regulations about the number of chooks you may have and where your chicken house may be located.

But after you’ve found out what you can and cannot do there are no other reasons why dwellers of suburbia are unable to keep backyard chickens in suburbia.

Often I am asked what breed of chickens you should buy and how many chickens you should have.

This depends of course on your own choice, but a general rule is that a good laying hen will lay around 300 eggs each year, or around 5 or 6 a week, more in summer than winter.

You can then look at how many eggs you require to determine how many chooks to keep.

But it’s extremely rare that you should have eggs going to waste. If you do simply ask the neighbours, they will fall all over themselves to buy your free range eggs.

On that basis, for the average family, 3 or 4 hens is usually sufficient, though more is more fun.

And what type of chicken to buy? There are many breeds, and there are different ways to select your hens. Do you want wonderful looking chickens or are you just looking for hens that will produce as many eggs as possible? In our case our choice of breed is determined by both considerations.

Because there is no doubt there are some wonderful fancy looking chickens available. Our kids love fancy chickens and so we have some wonderful pure white silky bantams. They don’t lay large eggs so are really there for their looks.

But they do look great.

For egg laying we tend to select Isa Browns. These are a good chook for laying plenty of eggs, though one drawback of Isa Browns is that they rarely sit on eggs, so if you want chicks each year Isa Browns may not deliver. Their lack of enthusiasm for sitting on eggs is the reason they are good layers, because once they start to sit on eggs they stop laying.

Having chicks is a wonderful experience. Every time we do so our kids love it, and delight in watching the chicks grow up. There are some negatives to allowing your chickens to hatch chicks though, the main one being what to do with the chicks when they get older. Of course around 50 percent will be roosters and so you will need to find something to do with them. They make good soup, however you will need to consider the council regulations.

However these are small problems when compared to the delights of keeping chickens as pets, and also of having those wonderful, tasty and fresh free range eggs to eat every day.

Peter has a website about chickens and chicken houses at http://www.chickenhouses.net.au

Why Does A Chicken House And Some Chickens Keep The Family Happy?

The kids have been pestering you for weeks about getting a pet. You consider getting a dog but you know that the barking will annoy the neighbours. And you also know that you don’t want a dog pooping all over the garden. Cats are nice but they scratch furniture. Have you considered keeping chickens as the ideal way to provide low maintenance pets for the kids?

There’s a whole host of reasons why chickens make wonderful pets. They don’t bark, and provided you don’t buy a rooster the neighbours won’t complain about the noise. They don’t smell and they don’t dig holes under the fence. They’re cheap to feed, need very little work and are fun day at around. Kids just love chickens, mine spend hours playing with them.

And there’s an added bonus to having chickens. You get eggs.

Lots of people never think about getting chickens as a pet when it comes to choosing a pet for the kids. As long as your council allows you to keep chickens it’s well worth considering. But there are some things to think about before you rush out and buy your hens. You need a good chicken house to house your chickens.

The henhouse needn’t be enormous. If you only have 3 or 4 hens then a modest size henhouse will house them admirably provided it has a nesting area and rungs for them to roost on at night.

It’s not hard to build yourself a henhouse. It’s basically just treated timber (for outdoor use) and some wire mesh, and some materials to cover in part of the henhouse so they have some shelter at night. Usually don’t need a floor as it sits on the ground.

And a small henhouse for 3 or 4 hens, if you add wheels one end and handles the other, can be moved around the garden so that the chicken droppings can fertilise the lawn in different spots from time to time. And there’s no reason chickens can’t free range around the garden during the day.

It’s the perfect handyman project for you to do together with the kids. Buy some materials, grab a hammer and nails, round up the kids and spend the afternoon building a fine chook house for your soon-to-be chicken collection. The kids will love it.

So if you’ve been looking for a solution to being pestered by the kids for pets consider chickens. It’s a good way to you to show the kids how well you can build a chicken house, and you’ll have happy kids, happy chickens and lots of eggs for dinner if you do.

Find a good recipe book, get started learning how to make omelettes for dinner and not only have you found a solution to getting pets for the kids and show them your handyman skills but you’ve also made your wife happy making dinner with your own free range eggs.

Build A Chicken House

Many people today are discovering the advantages of raising their own chickens which include amore fit fitter| more healthy] addition to their diet, prepared fertilizer for their garden or compost, entrepreneurial opportunities as well as the sheer pleasure.  The most important obstruction is finding the right chicken coop.  These chicken coop building plans are the answer to that problem, allowing you to build the coop that meets your needs .  When you have the right chicken coop you are well on your way to enjoying all the advantages of local chickens.

When you go to the grocery store, you purchase beef, eggs, produce, and it is really easy to presume that what you are eating is healthy.  Sadly, this is not always the case.  You never can tell what pesticides are now sitting on your kitchen counter, or what hormone additives are now sitting in your refrigerator.  More people are becoming aware of this fact, but few know how they can fight back for their family’s health.

Working class people have the option of building their own chicken coop to get get their own eggs.  This is asufficient good] alternative except for moving out into the country and living off the land.

Building your own chicken coop is relatively straightforward, and much cheaper than purchasing a premade coop.  As mentioned before, having an easy to follow chicken coop building plan is the main thing you need firstly.  Material required for making a chicken coop are wood, chicken wire, tin, and the tools for assembly, such as a saw and a drill.  Once you have gathered all the materials, you can build your chicken coop in only one or two hours.

After that, you have the security of knowing that your chickens will be contained, and likely be manufacturing more eggs than you can possibly use.  These excess eggs can be given to friends, or sold, since organic eggs are in heavy demand.  If you do opt to sell your excess eggs, then the coop will finally even pay for itself.

It is worth pointing out that chicken droppings make good ( and free ) fertilizer for your garden.  The coop keeps the chickens local, so a number of droppings are always fresh and straightforward to find.  As your garden prospers, you can make additional revenue by selling the surplus produce, or give it away to buddies and neighbors.  You’ll shortly be wondering how you lived without a chicken coop, once you are eating your fresh, healthy, organic meals.

So, instead of spending more than is critical to purchase questionable eggs and produce at the grocers, build your own chicken coop inexpensively using easily followed chicken coop building plans.  You need to also save some money by not buying an expensive premade chicken coop, but instead use these free chicken coop plans to build your coop.  It is going to be every bit as effective as the premade variety, but will pay for itself much sooner, not to mention giving you the satisfaction of having built it yourself.

Keeping Chickens In Your Backyard Has Great Benefits.

I’ve wanted to start keeping my own chickens for years now. I finally found time and built a medium sized chicken coop. The plans I bought over the internet made the process really easy. The ad for the book about how to build a chicken coop said that a 15 year old could build it. I guess that was meant to be a smart 15 year old! I can use a hammer, a saw and a screwdriver and that’s about all you’ll need by way of tools.

I want to tell you a bit more about my hobby of keeping chickens – I do it just as a hobby, not professionally, and see if I can help you to make some decisions if you’re thinking about keeping chickens in your backyard.

I remember as a boy, chicken was a meal for a special, celebratory occasion. Today of course chicken is very common and hardly special at all. The reason I mention this is because it is the way that chickens are raised today that has made the product so plentiful and so cheap, relative to other meats. The way chickens are raised in batteries is also a major reason why I keep my own brood, in my own suburban backyard.

If you’ve ever seen a battery hen in a chicken factory you will know what I am talking about. The cruelty these birds have to endure for their whole life is nothing short of a disgrace and a blot on our conscience. I had seen enough cancerous, deformed and deranged hens, picking at their own and others flesh out of sheer madness, that I stopped eating chickens and eggs for quite a while until free range products became readily available.

Then I discovered that free range did not always mean what I thought it meant – what it is supposed to mean – and I decided to keep my own chickens in my own chicken coop.

I did not intend to go on a crusade against chicken farms here so let me tell you of some other very good reasons to keep your own chickens.

Obviously the eggs come in real handy. The eggs from a truly free-range chicken are nothing short of spectacularly delicious. The yolk is not that washed out colour of a battery egg from a chicken pumped full of estrogen and growth hormone. Instead, it’s a bright, vivid yellow/orange colour with an absolute burst of flavour.

I know some folk who made the mistake of giving their birds names so they will never slaughter their chickens for the table. I keep my birds anonymous so that I am not emotionally distraught when I slaughter them. The meat is quite different to a supermarket bird. It’s plump and has a taste that is just outstanding. The skin gets really crispy. I don’t know exactly how and why but it’s just markedly better tasting than a supermarket bird. The additives in the chicken feed must have an effect on the quality and taste of the meat.

The freshness of the meat and eggs from your backyard brood is a contributory factor to the improved taste of course, but the biggest influence on the taste of the products is the absence of chemicals in the birds diet. Chemicals fed to battery raised chickens destroys the natural taste of the eggs and the meat. The chemicals, by the way, also find their way into your system and so you have also probably ingested female hormones and steroids with every egg and piece of chicken you’ve ever eaten. Many factory birds are fed on fishmeal feeds and the flavour of the fishmeal leeches into the meat.

In times like these when most people are trying to save some household costs and also trying to be more environmentally responsible, building a chicken coop and keeping your own chickens is a fairly substantial step in the right direction and it’s very easy to do. So, I guess the environmental impact is another good reason to have your own birds.

The fertiliser produced by the chickens is fantastic for your garden. You can use the fertiliser in the garden and save money on the cost of fertilisers.

Since the kids moved out there is often leftover food in our refrigerator that goes to waste. Well I should say used to go to waste because the chickens love leftovers. Onions and garlic are not good for them but all other foods are welcomed by them. Not just leftovers either, but peelings and cuttings as well. They are little fertiliser factories taking the scraps and the peels and turning it into fertiliser that enhances the plants and vegetables we have growing. It’s lovely to see the cycle of nature as it should be. They’ll trim the grass for you too. Like little lawnmowers!

If you keep your chickens as pets then you will get all the benefits that all pets give their owners. For me – well I don’t see the chickens as anything other than foodstuff.

If you build the right chicken coop for your intended number of chickens and for the location then your chicken coop becomes a pleasure to maintain. The right coop is easy to clean, well ventilated and comfortable for its inhabitants. If your birds are well fed and happy they will produce more eggs.

How hard was it to build the coop. It’s not that difficult if you have basic skills. The skills you need are quite basic but you do need some skills. That’s about it. The plans I eventually bought are step-by-step type plans so it was easy to follow. I was fortunate to choose a book of plans that also had other very valuable and useful information in it. Such as: where to place you coop, how to ensure that it doesn’t get too hot in the chicken coop and how to construct a coop that is easy to clean. Also, the book  contained advice on how to choose the correct type of bird for your area.

This is very good value from a book that only costs about $30. The materials used for my chicken coop was obtained cheaply at a local salvage yard. I built a medium sized chicken coop for under $200 and there is a local (major) hardware outlet that sells what I think is a lesser product for over $950. I saved a packet. My $200 investment was returned to me in under 6 months just on the value of eggs produced. By the way I keep 10 hens and I get 6 to 8 eggs every day. I charge almost double the supermarket price yet I have no shortage of eager customers for the 2 or 3 doz eggs I sell every week!

You can buy the book that I used on the internet for only $29.95. Just click here. I really found it to be very useful - exactly what I needed. You get it as an instant download, as soon as you pay. The online payment process is 100% secure.

That’s it. I hope that this information was of some help to you and I hope you enjoy building your chicken coop as much as I enjoyed the task of building mine. It’s a good thing to do and the upside is substantial. Have fun!