Home grown chickens to eat? (Merged Discussion)

betterlife

hi, i have another question, if i just get a couple chickens and let them have free range of my garden, would they lay there eggs anywhere or just in there house. my garden has 6ft fence all the way round is this safe enough. how high would my fence around the veg patch need to be. also i have 4 children 8yrs, 4yrs, 2 yrs and 6mths they play in the garden and have large trampoline, also there is a patio and flower bed is there anything else i should know before i decide. what if i went away for weekend do they need to be looked after or are they ok for 2/3 days with food. thanks

Lotus-eater

Chickens will normally lay in their house, but mine sometimes used to find a nice hole under a hedge and it would be a while before I found a clutch of eggs.
6ft fence will normally be high enough, I have had chickens that would jump on one, but normally they would look for somewhere to jump onto first, to give them a leg up.

Tbh I used a moveable 900mm chicken wire fence that I moved round the garden, otherwise you got poo everywhere, normally that would be enough to keep them in, but now and again I had to round them up. I would do this, otherwise you are going to get poo on your patio and places that your kids play.

You have to shut away chickens every night, fullstop. If you go away you must get someone else to do the letting out and in for you, same as food.
If you want to stop rats then only give the chickens the amount of food they can eat at one time, or even better a hopper that only delivers a small amount each time.

RHYSDAD

Kimitatsu wrote: »

It costs us about £20-£25 per month to feed 20 chooks and we can get up to 25 eggs a week out of that when they are in full flow.

Just to check. 20 birds, laying approx 6 eggs per week each, and you only total 2 dozen??? I make it nearer 10 dozen, surely????

arkonite_babe

We have a thread similar to this already, I'll add your query to it so all the replies are together. Posts are listed in date order so you'll need to read from the beginning to catch up


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Herr_Schmitt

Hi All, this is my first post so please be gentle with me!!

We are looking at getting 4-6 chickens just for laying eggs.

Are we better off getting all the same breed or can we mix them up?

Are some breeds better layer's than others?

Any advice greatly appreciated.

tudorfan22

we got ours from an ex battery farmer through the battery hen welfare trust www.bhwt.co.uk i think, its much nice cos theyre a charity and ensure they are taken out of horrible conditions and not turned into chicken nuggets. sorry its not a technical answer but these chooks are a year old an have been kept as battery hens for their ability to produce eggs, generally they will give you 50% producting a day (an egg every other day) but less in the winter cos they need sunlight to profuce the eggs and theres not too much of that at the mo!!! good luck!

Penelope_Penguin

Herr_Schmitt wrote: »

Hi All, this is my first post so please be gentle with me!!

We are looking at getting 4-6 chickens just for laying eggs.

Are we better off getting all the same breed or can we mix them up?

Are some breeds better layer's than others?

Any advice greatly appreciated.

Welcome to the Greenfingered board :beer: If you've never kept hens before, I'd recommend Warrens (sometimes known as Isa Browns). They're a cross breed, red hen. My friend's have laid reliably throught the winter, where my highly-strung rare breeds stopped for about 3 months :rolleyes:

I'll add this to the main thread on keeping hens later.

Penny. x

muvvahen

Hi there - great to have another potential convert to the hen world. Can I put in a word for Black Rocks. When we first looked into chook-keeping I had dreams of a rare-breed flock pecking decoratively in my immaculate garden...

But in the end I talked to a very helpful breeder who recommended the Rocks - a hybrid based on the Plymouth Rock and the Rhode Island Red. She said "They're the mopeds of the chicken world. Not exciting, but very economical and reliable". I'd agree wholeheartedly. Nearly six years later we have three of our original four still left and this is the first winter we have not had at least a few eggs from them over the dark days...

They're very hardy and i'd reckon we had maybe 280-300 eggs a year from each of them in the first few years.

Only downside is that they will destroy your garden!!! (We keep ours in a separate run, after they dug up lawn, dug up flower beds, dug up and eat vegetables... you get the picture!

Also they should be readily available from a reputable breeder, and cheeper :rolleyes: than pure-breeds

Hope this helps
Muvvahen

skipton

I'm new to chicken keeping (2 months). I have one Black Rock and two other breeds. She is a very friendly/bossy bird and has laid for the last six weeks. Hope you enjoy keeping the hens as much as we do. I'm going to introduce them to spaghetti now before they go off to bed in about an hours time.

mum_of_4

Goldline/ISA brown
Amber lee/link
Balckrock/Bovan's nera

All three will lay 300 eggs in their first year. The black rocks eggs will be very lrge in the second year.

All three are real, really friendly and great with children.

I have the above, (in my second flock as the first were such good layers) to give us a good supply of eggs and we also have 2 light sussex and one silver sussex. All the later are also really friendly but lay sligtly less eggs at about 260 a year.