The Chicken Yard

There are three basic ways to keep chickens:

 

There are advantages and disadvantages to both. Which one you choose will depend on the size of your yard, the surrounding area and your ultimate goals for your new pets.

Confinement

Confinement is keeping your birds behind a barrier inside a larger structure that keeps them safe from predators. It keeps all your laying hens in one area so you don’t experience the ‘everyday’ Easter egg hunt when gathering eggs and makes it easier to clean up the manure.

Since the birds are in one area, it also limits the varied diet to whatever it is you bring to them. This can increase the costs of feeding your birds. You can help reduce this by feeding them scraps from your table or raising crickets and other fast reproducing insects. We will discuss more of those options in the saving money in raising chickens section.

Another disadvantage to this method is the fact that it will only take from a week to ten days for a confined flock of chickens to thoroughly eat every blade of grass within reach. In less than two weeks, the ground in your confinement area will be bare of anything green or edible.

Depending on the size of your flock, and the size of the confinement area, it may cause additional stress to your birds. In overcrowded conditions, chickens experience stress that may cause them to attack one another or die prematurely. Ideally, in one eight foot long and three foot wide confined area, you should have no more than four chickens.

Free Ranging

Free range birds are secured in a coop at night but during the day are allowed to wander in search of bugs, grass, and other goodies. Free range birds get more of a balanced diet with the variety of foods they scrounge for themselves. This of course is cheaper for you because they are not solely dependent on the food you provide.

It also gives you the best chance at those rich tasting eggs when the chickens’ diet includes proteins as well as the grains. Unfortunately, this leaves them open to daytime predators like foxes, dogs and cats. It is very sad to lose your pet to predators, so you may opt for a confinement option, to keep your pets safe.

Limited Ranging

Limited ranging means that the chicken coop is surrounded by a larger enclosure that keeps predators out but gives the birds room to wander, give themselves dirt baths and get the exercise they need. Some call this larger enclosure a chicken run. Due to the size of this larger enclosure, it will not be movable and it will result in the area underneath becoming bare within the first month of the chickens scratching around in it. Could a moveable coop be the answer for you?

Chicken Tractors

If none of the three other options will do for you, you may want to consider purchasing or building a chicken tractor, which is essentially a moveable coop. The entire coop is built on an axle with wheels that allows you to move it across the lawn every week. It gives the area under the tractor time to recover from the hungry chickens.

It offers the protection of the coop 24/7 with the somewhat limited freedom of free range birds. While there are chicken tractors sold by manufacturers, you could build your own. Keep in mind the limitations of the number of birds you want and the needs you will have.

A chicken tractor small enough to move will not be able to house more than a handful of hens. Instructions on how to build the confinement areas, coops and chicken tractors can be found in the appendix of this book.

How Much Space Does My Chicken Need?

If you ask the chicken experts, they will say each chicken needs a minimum of four square feet of space. That’s a good amount of room to keep your chickens healthy and happy. In a pinch, you can house more birds in a limited area, but it shouldn’t be on a permanent basis.

So if you are planning on having four hens, you will need a coop with sixteen square feet of space and if you are putting a chicken run on the coop, the run should add another sixteen square feet of space.

Your Chicken Coop

While we will discuss the building of your coop later there are a few basic elements that you need to in your coop. Remember that hens are ground laying birds. They will need nesting boxes that are on the ground, quiet, preferably dark and not very roomy.

You can, if you have the skills, build your own nesting boxes or you could use discarded milk crates stuffed with hay. Milk crates make ideal nesting boxes as they are easily cleaned and chicken poo doesn’t collect in the bottom and stay there.

A five gallon bucket cut in half lengthwise and secured so that it doesn’t roll is also a good cheap alternative to building your own nesting boxes. One five gallon bucket makes two nesting boxes. You can usually find these available for free from bakeries, Chinese restaurants, and fast food restaurants.

The chickens are also roosting birds. At night, they get as far up off the ground as they can get, latch onto a branch, a pole or anything their toes can wrap around and they fall fast asleep. You will need to install a pole that is sturdy, and far enough off the ground that even if the predator enters the coop, it won’t be able to reach the birds.

Placement of this roost is important too, make sure that there is no food or water underneath as the feces will continue to fall while the chickens sleep.

If you house the chickens in an existing shed or building, then be prepared for a regular massive clean-up of feces. This can be alleviated through the use of bedding spread liberally over the floor. Hay, shredded newspapers, or pine shavings can be swept out and composted.

Housing Your Chicken

The two main ways to get a coop for your birds is first, buy one from a professional coop builder and second, to build it yourself. Examples of the types of coops you may be interested in buying include:

 

Instructions on how to build them can be found at the end of this book. For now, there are some things you need to consider before you place one in your yard.

The area that you put your coop should have plenty of access to sunshine, and not be in a low place in the yard to avoid rainy day floods that leave your birds walking in water. The ground should be solid grass, not soil or sand.

Whether you are building or purchasing a coop you should lay down a length of either chicken wire or hardware cloth for the coop to rest on. This bottom layer of protection should extend outward six inches from all sides of the coop. This will discourage predators from digging up underneath the coop.

Where you see instructions on how to build a coop and these instructions call for the use of chicken wire on the outside frame, you may want to consider hardware cloth instead. Raccoons can and do reach through chicken wire to attack any chicks or hens underneath. They will pull them apart piece by piece. So if raccoons are a problem in your area instead of using chicken wire, use hardware cloth. It’s not a cloth, it’s a fence type material with a smaller hole pattern that won’t allow any animal to insert a paw inside. Yes, it is more expensive, but well worth the investment.

Finally, if you are building a coop, remember that you will have to build it so that you can get inside to harvest eggs, clean the coop and replace bedding. So there are two choices. First, build it small with access doors so you can clean inside. This lets you move it easily from location to location. Second, build it big enough for you to be able to walk inside. You don’t want to crawl through chicken poo to get to the eggs.