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.
However before you start buying your first brood of chooks you do need to spend a little time considering how you will house them. Chickens are generally housed in what is called a chicken coop, chicken house or henhouse.
Whether you buy or build a chicken coop doesn’t matter, it’s perfectly possible to build one using simple second-hand materials that you scrounge from the neighbours, and is reasonably cheap to build. A good chicken coop is really just a garden shed with a number of modifications.
There are a few specific things that you will need to install in your henhouse before you get your first bunch of chooks. They will need nesting boxes to lay their eggs, and to sit on those eggs if you let them build up, and it is worth having more than one nesting box even if you only have a small number of hens. Make them small so that only one chook can fit in the nesting box at one time or you will find 2 of them are battling for position at the same time to lay their eggs.
And as chickens like to lay where it is dark make sure the nesting boxes are relatively dark or they will lay somewhere else darker, for example in the corner of the chicken coop.
You will also need perches. These provide somewhere for the chooks to sleep, as they sleep standing up and off the ground. A simple bar, say 50 by 75 millimetres, a foot or 2 off the floor of the coop, with around 200 millimetres of space for each chook, and you’re good to go.
You will need food and water provided either in or outside the chicken house, however if it is provided outside you will need to ensure that any food left is not in the open so it will not get wet in the rain.
But if the food or water is placed under the perch it will become fouled with droppings.
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.
Collecting eggs every day is the best part of keeping chickens, and your own free range eggs always taste better than the supermarket variety. If you have too many just ask a few neighbours, there will always be some who will buy them from you.
There are many pets that you can consider for the children. However it’s difficult to think of a another idea for a pet that will provide you with a useful product as well as being a good companion for the children.
And there’s no doubt that kids love chickens, ours absolutely adore them.
So why not research a little about keeping chickens. Decide whether to buy or build a chicken coop, where you will put it and how you will clean it and then get your first bunch of chooks. You won’t regret it.
