Keeping Chickens

Building Chicken Coops for your backyard.

After deciding on keeping chickens in your backyard you will need to think about building chicken coops. Purchasing a pre-built coop from a local supplier is an expensive option. I suggest you consider building a chicken coop yourself as you will gain a lot of satisfaction from a project such as this. Our whole family helped build our chicken coop, we all had fun and we are very proud to say that we made it ourselves.

An important step now is to check with your local authorities for any by-laws in your area about keeping chickens and the location of the chicken coop in your backyard. Our local council currently has no restrictions if you keep no more than three chickens and have no roosters.

Building chicken coops properly is essential when you are keeping chickens. It needs to keep them

• Safe from predators
• Comfortable in all weather conditions
• Clean, to minimise health problems

We designed and built our own chicken coop based on  plans we purchased for building chicken coops . We found that purchasing plans removed some of the worry and we will still had the satisfaction of building it ourselves. It  also saved us lots of time and money.

Our three chickens have a coop that is 1.7 m x2.7 m with a chicken run attached that is 3.6m x 2.7m. You could build yours a bit smaller depending on how many chickens you plan to keep but we wanted our chickens to have plenty of room. We also let them out to scratch around the garden a few times a week.

Great News

Today as I started writing this blog post our first egg arrived. Not sure who laid it – Fennel, Gertie or Warj??  but it was enjoyed by all of us – poached on toast – yum. Looking forward to many more eggs in the coming days.

Stay tuned for my next blog when I will share some great egg recipes so that you can enjoy the produce from your chickens.

Good luck building chicken coops.

Cheers, Melanie

Keeping Chickens is a fun hobby with wonderful benefits for you and your family.

• Chickens are delightful creatures, unwind after a busy day by sitting down with a cup of tea and simply watching them scratch around and gently “cluck” to each other.
• Enjoy the benefit of converting your kitchen scraps to beautiful golden yolked eggs.
• Your garden will thrive on another byproduct from your chickens – manure.

We have had our three chickens in our backyard for nearly three weeks now and we are patiently waiting for the first egg to arrive.  Our two children had a lot of fun naming “our girls” and finally settled on Fennel, Gertie and Warj (named after their late great grandmother’s nickname).

Our family have been thinking about Keeping Chickens in our urban backyard for a while, stay tuned for next week’s blog when I will share the important preparation needed prior to purchasing your chickens.

Thank you for reading my blog, I’ll let you know when the first egg arrives!

Cheers, Melanie

Please feel free to leave comments about your experiences keeping chickens.