Anyone here own chickens and have some experience to share?
We have 0.8 acres of fenced pasture with a barn and all that good stuff. We’re actually going to be raising alpacas on it (I spin yarn and want the fiber), we’re getting our first alpacas in the next three weeks or so.
But we know we also want chickens – we just want them for eggs, not meat, and it turns out it’s pretty beneficial to have them around alpacas since they eat the flies that bother them.
We don’t have a chicken coop and would need to build one. Anyone had experience with that and want to share? Urban/suburban chicken keeping seems to be on the rise; a coworker two doors down from me has five chickens himself. I’m soliciting opinions, advice, and other useful information from other possible chicken owners.
Chickens? My goodness, what an idea. Why didn’t I think of that? Chickens! Caryn, there’s four places. There’s the Chicken Hut, that’s on third. There’s Chickens-R-Us, that’s on third too. You got Put-Your-Wing-There, that’s on third. Swing Low, Sweet Chicken … matter of fact, they’re all in the same complex; it’s the chicken complex on third.
I’m still a newbie myself, but I’m getting ready to post something about building a chicken coop to my blog soon. I’m willing to answer any questions you have about my experience building it. I basically bought some plans and then made some minor modifications that I thought might be helpful.
I am not much of a builder, but actually managed to pull it together pretty quickly. Here are some recent photos:
I do have a question for the people that HAVE chickens - can you eat those disgusting animals any more after you’ve seen how they live? I can deal with the fact that a chicken will occasionally, you know, accidentally eat its own shit while it’s looking for food in an abstracts sense, but the stories my mother has told me about the chickens they used to keep when she was little were very nearly enough to put me off them entirely.
In the wild they’re like other ground birds, they cover large areas of land and are pretty clean. Raising them in shit-filled confined areas will tend to make them “disgusting” though, yes.
My dog Pace, an Irish soft coated wheaten terrier, loves chicken shit. He eats the wet stuff, rolls in the dry stuff, and sniffs the bottoms of the birds that drop it. Fortunately I do not plan to eat the dog, so it doesn’t really bother me (much). God knows I have my own shortcomings. Face licking has been curtailed until further notice.
