Anyone keep chickens?

blushingbride_3

my chickens r a bit muddy @ the mo which might be why i only got 2 eggs yesterday

I'm planning on building a new run @ the weekend which i can walk into & has a roof to stop the rain coming in so much & then hopefully it will be less muddy & they'll be kept in now.

anyone else got a run like that? fancy showing me some piccies?

Also is it cruel keeping them in all the time as i dont really have space for free ranging.

SailorSam

steel sheds

I was looking at this small steel shed in B&Q as a possible chicken home.
I thought at less than £100 it was a good buy compared to the likes of the egloo and being steel could be kept clean easier than a wooden one. Simply get the power wash on it.
Any thoughts ?

saveumcowboy

I have 3 hens and an eglu. I don't use the eglu run, my husband made me a walk in run with a roof which is 2m x 4m and they do free range as often as I can.
Heres their run....


Personally if you can afford the eglu then I *totally* recommend it. Today the weather was foul and my husband took the eglu apart totally, cleaned it and put it back together in about 5/10mins max. It is like new again when it has been cleaned and you don't need to get the wall paper stripper out to scrape the poo off the coup floor.

As for what the run is on, after trying a few things we went for slabs. We found them on earth, especially in summer, made them really smelly really quickly and also if it rained they just had a mud bath. So the slabs went down and we use hard wood chips on the floor. Really easy to keep clean and the chooks *love* scratching around in the hard wood chips.

saveumcowboy

SailorSam wrote: »

steel sheds

I was looking at this small steel shed in B&Q as a possible chicken home.
I thought at less than £100 it was a good buy compared to the likes of the egloo and being steel could be kept clean easier than a wooden one. Simply get the power wash on it.
Any thoughts ?

I would say that in the winter it would just be like an ice box and in the summer it would cook them.

saveumcowboy

blushingbride wrote: »

anyone else got a run like that? fancy showing me some piccies?

Also is it cruel keeping them in all the time as i dont really have space for free ranging.

Take a look at my post above for pictures. As for keeping them in all day, well I go on a few forums and they tend to say that if they aren't going to be let out to free range then they need at least 1m sq per bird but 2msq (or more) is better. If there are too many birds in close proximity you can end up with bullying and chicken bullying isn't nice.

saveumcowboy

Just to add, straw in the bottom of the run is a bad idea. It gets wet quickly and retains the water and goes very smelly very quickly.