Beginner's Guide to Owning Chickens
/Chickens are relatively easy to keep and with the right care, they can provide your family with eggs, manure, and companionship. The average family will find that 8-12 hens can provide sufficient eggs for their own needs.
Food, Water, and Shelter
Food:
Chickens eat chicken feed, bugs, worms, greens, grasses, and food scraps.
Chicken feed should have 16-18% protein content.
Chicken feed should be kept dry, covered, and secure against pests and vermin.
Water:
Fresh, clean water needs to be available at all times, even in the winter.
A warmer may be required during the winter months to prevent water from freezing.
Shelter:
Your chicken coop should be dry and draft free. Clean the coop daily to maintain cleanliness and prevent disease.
The floor should have litter to absorb moisture. Options for litter/bedding materials are straw, peat moss, pine shavings, wood shavings, sawdust, or sand.
The coop should be large enough to allow 3-6 square feet per bird.
Nesting boxes are important to have for laying eggs along with shelves or bars in the coop. This allows a place for the birds to perch at night for sleeping.
Sleeping up high is a natural instinct for chickens to help them avoid predators.
Manure
Chicken manure is a valuable resource that can be used in flower and garden beds to provide nutrients and organic matter to the soil. However, with the use of poultry wastes comes the responsibility to handle it safely and to apply it at rates that are appropriate for the soil and crops being grown. Fresh chicken manure is high in nitrogen and can damage roots and possibly kill plants, so it’s important to age or compost manure before application. Composting will also help prevent pathogens and parasites from contaminating your crops.
Consider the weather conditions before applying manure or compost, and avoid applying in the rain. Over-applying can affect plant growth and cause surface water contamination, so it is best to do soil testing and learn what your nutrient requirements are beforehand.
Composting
Your average-size hen produces one cubic foot of manure every six months. It’s important this manure doesn’t accumulate in your coop—it stinks, attracts rodents and flies, and the ammonia is not healthy for your chickens to breathe. Composting can be a way to safely dispose of your chicken manure.
Collect Manure and Bedding. Chicken owners normally use bedding such as shavings, sawdust, or straw to provide a dry cushion for chickens and to control odor and pests. The coop bedding can be collected with the manure and dumped into a composting bin.
Carbon to Nitrogen Balance. A combination of 30 parts carbon (C) to one part nitrogen (N) creates the ideal environment for microbes to break down organic material to produce compost. Carbons are your coop bedding and the nitrogen is the manure.
When combining coop bedding and chicken manure, how do you achieve the ideal carbon to nitrogen (C:N) ratio?
Since different types of bedding each has its own C:N ratio, the proportion of bedding to manure will vary depending on the type of bedding used. To keep things simple, most composters follow the general rule of one part carbon to two parts nitrogen. However, because chicken manure is so high in nitrogen you may be more successful using a 1:1 or even a 2:1 C:N mixture.
