Having Hens Is A Brillient Passtime For All The Family
If you want the perfect family pet for your children, and one which can be profitable for mum and dad as well, then you should look at buying a chicken coop and some hens.
Hens have several benefits as pets. Obviously the first advantage of keeping chickens is that they provide you with wonderful, healthy and extremely tasty free range eggs.
You will not believe how great an egg can be until you've sampled your own fresh laid free range eggs from your own chickens. You're going to immediately dump all of those store eggs.
And hens are plenty of fun to have. Each possesses its own personality, they come in a variety of sizes and shapes and surprisingly, if you happen to bring them up correctly, they are an affectionate pet.
We've got chickens and the children absolutely adore them. One that we've brought up by hand is so tame that it will race up to you as soon as you enter the chicken yard and climb onto your shoes till you pick it up and give it a pat.
But there's some things you must give consideration to before you buy your first chickens. The first is where you will house them.
Commonly chickens are housed in what is known as a chicken house, but is also sometimes known as chicken house or a henhouse. This is a structure that has been built specifically for having your hens and has quite a few essential things built into it.
In your chicken house you really need to supply perches. They're rungs approximately 1 to 2 inches wide which your hens use to sleep on. Just like birds in the wild will perch on a branch to sleep hens also want to sleep off the ground and will perch to do so.
And you'll also require nesting boxes. Nesting containers are where your hens will go to lay their eggs. A nesting box should be around the size of one hen only. If you make them any bigger then you'll find, as I normally do, that despite the fact that that there is 2 or 3 to select from there will be 2 hens both attempting to lay inside the same nesting box simultaneously.
It is important that the nesting box be above the floor as hens prefer a nesting box that way, and that it be comparatively dark. If the nesting boxes are extremely light you might well discover your hens will lay their eggs in the dark corner. They seem to love it darker when they lay.
You will have to think about providing both water and food for the hens as well. Often this is supplied in the chicken house, often by means of automatic feeding and watering, however many people handfeed their hens.
Having an automated watering and feeding system means that having hens doesn't subject you to exactly the same problems that you would have with lots of other pets, specifically what do you do with them when you go away. Provide adequate food and water for the week and you can securely leave your chickens by themselves and no harm should come to them. We have done it many times.
Visit any farm store to find various versions of watering and feeding systems. Remember not to position the feed or water near or beneath either the perches or nesting boxes as your chickens will poop in their own food or water quite contentedly.
While some people leave their chickens in the chicken house all day I much prefer to provide a yard where they can free range. I've got a simple yard surrounded by chicken wire so they contentedly peck away throughout the day. And I like to let my chickens out to free range around the house from time to time and it is wonderful to see your hens contentedly eating pests in the garden.
There are many varieties of chicken coup available. Look on the net and you'll see all sorts of interesting models for sale, produced from all sorts of materials such as steel, plastic and timber. Many people make their very own henhouse. I did so, which is an inexpensive way to supply your hens with a fine house to live in.
Whether you want to be a handyman to make your own chicken house or whether you prefer to purchase one doesn't matter. What does make a difference is that you take the first step towards keeping your own hens by deciding how many hens you need. This depends upon how many eggs you need each day, and how much room you can allocate to your chickens.
Nevertheless getting too many eggs is rarely a problem, just sell a few to your nearby neighbors, they'll fall all over each other to purchase your wonderful free range eggs.
I hope this has made you enthusiastic about learning much more about keeping hens. It is a fantastic hobby, kids think it's great, and it's a terrific way to expose the kids to pets. And also to guarantee a constant supply of omelettes.
There is certainly of course a lot more to keeping chickens than what I've written here, this is just intended as an introduction. In the event you are serious do a little more research, dive deeper in to the ins and outs of keeping chickens, then get out there and grab yourself half a dozen birds and a chicken coop and you're on your way.
About the Author:
Visit Peter's web site about Chicken Houses where you can get more suggestions about having chickens at http://www.chickencoops.net.au and about how you keep your hens healthy and happy and laying wonderful eggs
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