chicken coop – The Best Approach for Filling Your Chicken Coop with a Productive Egg Laying Flock by Joshua Harding

Keeping poultry is not surprisingly becoming quite a fashionable pursuit and it is not hard to appreciate why. It does not take a great amount of cash to begin and you can do it without a whole lot of sweat. Plus, it won’t be long before you are gathering nutritious eggs for the kitchen table. If you have decided to raise poultry in your yard there are a few tasks you are required to do prior to filling your hen house with pullets..

To keep pullets you ought to put up a good home for them. This will come in the manner of a hen house and will include nesting boxes and water fountains. Once everything in place it is simply a matter of filling your chicken coop with poultry. But you can’t just drive to the neighborhood grocery store to find these chickens, so where do you buy them? There are a multitude of ways, each having their own exclusive advantages and disadvantages. Learning these diverse options will teach you what you can do to assure yourself the maximum amount and best quality of nutritious eggs at the soonest possible time.

There are two main options for establishing your laying flock. Either hatch your birds from fertile eggs or acquire live birds. Hatching eggs on your own is accomplished utilizing an incubator or a brooding hen. Live birds can be purchased as day-old chicks, started hens, or second-year chickens. Both eggs and live chickens can be purchased from a great number of big commercial hatcheries which are easy to find by probing the internet. One of my favorite hatcheries is Murray McMurray Hatchery, but there are a great number of them around.

Using a brooding hen to hatch your eggs is probably not the top choice because there are too many things that can go wrong, which will cause disappointment for the beginner. The same thing can be said if you want to hatch eggs utilizing an incubator. The incubator temperature needs to remain the same for the whole time which is not a simple job to sustain. Additionally, if you buy hatching eggs they may possibly be more expensive than day-old chicks so there’s actually no reason to purchase hatching eggs.

Day-old birds almost always are delivered by the postal service and these little birds require the use of a brooder to keep them warm and cozy for the first few weeks of their lives. Poultry brooders are not cheap so buying one will ratchet up your costs tremendously. Day-old birds also need some special nurturing so you will expend a good deal more time growing these youthful birds than you will if you buy started birds or second-year chickens.

Pullets produce a great amount of eggs their initial year and then decrease production each succeeding year. Moreover, the eggs lessen in quality each and every year. This is one of several reasons why second-year pullets are not the best choice. They have previously laid eggs one year so by the time you get them they will be less productive.

Started pullets are classically about nineteen or twenty weeks of age and have not quite reached their laying age. With this kind of chicken you will probably be able to start gathering eggs soon after buying them. They will be more expensive than day-old birds, but you can recover most, if not all, of the cost difference since you will not need to feed them during the initial few months of their existence. This can save you a bunch of cash on feed. And you won’t have to buy a high-priced brooder since they will be put into the hen house as soon as they arrive.

As a substitute for buying day-old birds, if you buy started birds you will remove the expense of a brooder, several months of effort keeping them, and a good deal of cash feeding them for the initial nineteen or twenty weeks. Plus, you will typically be able to start gathering eggs pretty soon after you get them. The quickest way to fill up your hen house with productive pullets is to buy started hens.

About The Author

Joshua Harding has grown poultry for nearly thirty years and has manufactured all of his own chicken coops throughout those years. He is skilled in growing poultry for meat and egg production. He has an instructional website where you can obtain free info on the subject of building a hen house, successfully raising poultry, and more.

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Ok so 3 more posts today that I’ve dug up – I’m an information JUNKIE on this stuff lately. Give em a browse and let me know what ya reckon. They’re just from a few different sites I’ve been surfing lately that are generally good for information like this…

How To Build a Hen House | Chicken DIY

If you want to learn how to build a hen house, keep on reading this article. It's important to keep your birds safe and warm so that it protects them from predators and also from diseases that the hens could get.

Hen Houses | How To Make A Hen House | Chicken Houses – Feed …

To keep your chickens productive and healthy, you need to build a hen house to cater to the needs of your birds and your convenience.Happy And Healthy Chickens = MORE EGGS I [...],The Dr. 5z5 Open Feed Directory is an Open Edited …

Hen Houses – How To Build A Chicken House – pressemeldungen.at

Chickens are fun to observe and they can offer you eggs and beef. Often times folks buy chickens an.

Hope you enjoy the read as much as I did and please if you have something to say, use the comments form below to let everyone know your thoughts.

Have a great day!

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Livestock In The Garden

Garden Hens
Some gardeners will tell you that you can’t have a nice garden and keep hens. That is a matter of opinion. Don’t be fooled, hens can be hard work, they can be very messy and they do scratch around the beds and borders, but provided you have a fairly large garden and are sensible about where they can forage, you really can garden and keep hens.
For gardeners there are plenty of benefits in keeping hens. Their droppings are very rich in nutrients; much too rich to use neat, but you can add them to the compost heap to enrich your home compost beautifully. If you use a dust free sawdust for bedding, then the soiled bedding can be composted down to create a wonderful, nutrient rich sol conditioner.

If your garden is pristine then you can still allow the hens out in the autumn, winter and early spring when they will rummage around the garden feeding on bugs, slug eggs and other garden nasties. A couple of hens or a trio can be controlled and directed to particular areas where they won’t do too much damage. It’s essential to keep an eye on them and not to leave them in one place too long. Hens are useful for cleaning up the compost heap, where they devour bugs, weed seeds and pest eggs. Hens also eat a wide variety of edible weeds such as chickweed, fat hen, bitter cress and dandelions. They also create great entertainment too. The secret of combining hens and the garden is that you need to be able to contain them when the garden is burgeoning and restrict them to areas where they can do minimal damage for the rest of the time. If you can do that successfully your hens can live happily in harmony with your garden and you will reap their rich rewards.
There are lots of ill rumours that surround keeping hens in the garden, and of course there are always ups and downs, but most of it is down to common sense. You are dealing with real live creatures that need care and attention and a high standard of cleanliness and hygiene. Hen houses do provide shelter but hens are still susceptible to weather changes; extreme wet, heat and cold can all take their toll. Keep your hen house as clean as possible. A build up of droppings can cause respiratory problems and are a health hazard. Remove droppings daily to keep the house clean. Always use suitable and dedicated cleaners for poultry houses and do not resort to household chemicals that may affect your hens.

You are
1000
never far from a rat and of course, poultry food attracts vermin so you need to take precautions. Always store grain and seed in metal bins that are secure and dry and cannot be gnawed through. Take care where you feed the hens and don’t leave food out overnight where rats can take advantage.

Sensible husbandry, good hygiene and the ability to cover your hen accommodation to protect it from wild birds are all powerful, but simple weapons to prevent problems with your flock.
Clean feeders, drinkers, housing and your own clothing, especially foot ware. Wash hands after handling your birds or collecting eggs.

Choose proper food and drink containers kept hanging off the ground, not in open bowls. Choose quality food. If you feed your hens just scraps you can’t expect them to be reliable egg producers, they need a properly balanced diet to lay good quality eggs. Kitchen scraps can encourage rodents and is not good practice. Housing birds in fully wired movable arks are ideal, as wild birds cannot gain access to feed and water and so avoids contamination.

By: Mark Spencers

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