Keep Chickens!: Tending Small Flocks in Cities, Suburbs and Other Small Spaces (15 page)

You will also need a larger waterer for your chickens. Chickens are thirsty birds. How thirsty? The Girls can easily go through a gallon a day. They drink even more on hot days. Install a 3- or 5-gallon (11 or 19 L) plastic or galvanized steel waterer in the coop or henhouse. As with the feeder, suspend the waterer so that it is as high as your chickens’ backs. Keep the water dispenser in a shady area to keep the water cool and fresher longer. Check the water level in the waterer every day to make sure your chickens haven’t tilted it and caused it to leak and spill out. Refill or refresh the water as necessary.

Pullet feed is basically hen feed without any calcium additives. Calcium makes for strong eggshells. Give your chickens pullet feed until they are about four to five months old. At about this time, the birds are fully feathered, their butts are really fuzzy, and their legs and hips seem to spread farther apart so that they have a bell-bottomed shape. When your hens’ bottoms start spreading, it means your girls are near egg-laying time.

As your pullets transition into henhood, gradually mix in hen laying feed (the one fortified with calcium) with the remainder of the pullet feed. The laying feed is made up of larger pellets than pullet or chick feed. Give your hens time to get used to this — at least two weeks — by mixing the adult laying feed into the remaining pullet feed in increasing increments until all the pullet feed is gone. By that time, your hens will have laid their first eggs.

Once your chicks have become pullets, introduce grit into their diet. Grit is gravel or small rocks pullets and hens need to eat, along with their chicken feed. Why? Because chickens don’t have teeth. Think of grit as the only “teeth” the chicken has to chew its food. When a chicken eats, food goes into the crop first. The crop is like a chicken’s initial stomach — it doesn’t digest food, but merely prepares it for its imminent journey down the gullet and into the gizzard.

The gizzard is a chicken’s muscular “second stomach.” Grit joins ingested food in a chicken’s gizzard. While the gizzard undulates like a flexing and relaxing muscle, the grit gets tossed around with the food, which gradually mashes up all the food for subsequent digestion. Without grit freely available to your hens, they will not digest their food properly and they may become ill.

Keep about a small cup of grit available at all times in a sturdy container that won’t tip over. I use a clean tuna or cat food can posted on top of a wood stake in the ground. (I remove the label, punch a hole in the bottom of the can, and screw it into the stake.)

Keep chicken feed clean by storing it in a large, resealable plastic container. I use two large trash barrels: one with the open bags of feed and scratch stored inside, the other for the unopened bags of feed and scratch. Storing the chicken feed and snacks in water-tight, vermin-resistant containers lets me keep the food near the hungry hens, out back behind their coop.

Poultry Tribune,
circa 1940.

If you really love your chickens, give them scratch. Scratch is a mixture of cracked grains and corn. It’s sweet, fattening, and delicious — like caramel corn for chickens. They go crazy for it.

Scratch is a good snack for chickens, but it should never be substituted for the daily laying feed. Scratch contains a lot of corn, which is high in fat and low in protein. Your hens need at least 16 percent protein in their diet each day, which they’ll get in the prepared hen feed, but not solely from scratch.

Since scratch is high in fat, I dish it out to the Girls before they roost in the evenings. I tend to give them a little more scratch in winter, so they’ll have something in their gizzards to keep them warm on our cold Northwest nights. Feeding your hens too much scratch will make them fat — too fat. Plump hens are happy hens, but obese hens are susceptible to health problems.

When feeding your chicken, think in terms of variety. A chicken is what a chicken eats. Would you be healthy if you ate nothing but pepperoni pizza for breakfast, lunch, and dinner? Happy perhaps, but not healthy. It’s the same with chickens. In addition to prepared chicken feed and occasional scratch snacks, they need some variety in their diet. They especially need greens and vegetables. If you can’t let them out in the yard often enough to nibble on your lawn, or if you have no lawn, toss some greens into the coop every day. Chickens can have even wilted greens and produce, so long as they are not spoiled.

I like to give my hens some fresh greens each day, together with a few pieces of fruits or vegetables. When lettuce and corn are on sale, I always get extra for the Girls. I also am fortunate to have a wonderful neighbor who works in a grocery produce department and brings the Girls tasty, fresh, and otherwise wasted greens and vegetables.

Chickens love to eat breads and starches, like rice and pasta, but take it easy on the portions you give them. Excessive amounts of grain products can make your poultry portly. Small bits of bread treats are fine. For instance, I don’t like eating the heels on a sliced loaf of bread. Guess what? The chickens aren’t as fickle as I am — they love the bread heels! When I have leftover rice or pasta that does not merit storing in the fridge, I toss it into the coop with the greens and vegetables.

When I want to really give my chickens a savory treat, or when I need to bribe them back into their coop, I bring out the heavy artillery: cottage cheese. I swear, the Girls would hold their eggs ransom for that cottage cheese if they could. And it’s not only a proven bribe but also is full of vitamins and is a great source of protein. Once a week, I’ll put out about a half-cup of low-fat, no-salt cottage cheese for the Girls. Why is low- or no-salt cottage cheese best? Because chickens already get whatever salt they need in their prepared feed. The Girls are on prepared feed because it has exactly what they need for optimum and balanced nutrition. Too much salt in their diet will not only make chickens thirstier than they already are, but it can also affect their laying and health (nobody wants a hypertensive hen!).

Feed your chicks not only chicken feed but also greens, fruits, and vegetables. They love the variety, and it will make their eggs rich and luscious.

• Lettuce
  
• Greens (spinach, chard)
  
• Tomatoes
  
• Corn (fresh, no butter)
  
• Bread and pasta (in moderation)
  
• Cottage cheese (low-fat, no salt)
  

• Spicy food
  
• Rotten food
  
• Sour food
  
• Potato chips (or any high-fat, high-sodium, deep-fried junk food)
  
• Cabbage (makes eggs stinky)
  
• Garlic (also makes eggs stinky)
  
• Raw potato peels (chickens have trouble digesting them)
  

The coop is built. Your darling chicks have grown into pullets, which have matured into hens. The hens have been eating and drinking like queens. In fact, they are starting to look like King Henry VIII on chicken legs. So what’s next? The moment we’ve all been waiting for — the eggs!

Eggs for cakes, cookies, quiche. Eggs for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. So many eggs that I have to give them away to grateful relatives, friends, and neighbors. Everyone I know was as excited about those first eggs as I was. In a funny way, eggs seem to bring people together. It did in my family and circle of friends, and it will for you and yours.

Once your hens start laying, people by the dozen come out of the woodwork, humbly pleading for those fresh, backyard jewels. Walk a balanced line so you don’t deny anyone your backyard eggs, but do not overindulge anyone, either. While true largesse is giving away one or two dozen eggs at a time, dole out those gorgeous, yolky gems frugally, a half dozen at a time. This is not to be stingy, because you will have more than enough eggs for yourself even if you give half of them away. The parsimonious passing out of the eggs as a sort of continuing ransom will ensure a steady stream of egg-craving friends and visitors for your chickens.

When the Girls were about five months old, an informal “egg watch” began and was ongoing nearly 24 hours a day until the first egg was dropped. The phone would ring. The dog would bark as neighbor after neighbor stopped at the front door. Over and over, the question: “So . . . uh, any eggs yet?” When one of the Girls laid an egg the first time, everyone got a phone call (known in our family as the Egg Call).

Lucy began to lay at almost five months, and Whoopee and Zsa Zsa kicked in at five and a half months. Lucy is the most prolific chicken, with almost 300 eggs in her first year of laying. Zsa Zsa had laid 200 eggs in almost eleven months. Whoopee is the laggard, tallying a mere 112 eggs over ten months. That’s okay — what Whoopee lacks in egg production, she makes up for with her good looks and goofy personality.

How do I know how many eggs the Girls have laid? Because I keep an egg journal. It’s a fun way to keep track of the eggs I collect from my flock. You can use a calendar, a spreadsheet, or even a real journal to document your hens’ egg-laying ways. Once the Girls started gifting me with eggs, I became familiar with the color and style of egg laid by each chicken. I identified and noted each egg every day on my kitchen wall calendar. Of course, keeping track of eggs is easy with two or three chickens, but it gets more challenging with each additional hen.

Hens begin laying anywhere from five to six months of age. A pullet’s first egg will be small. It may also be discolored and somewhat misshapen. That’s okay — after all, your chicken is just getting started, and it takes a couple of months for nature to calibrate this process. After that first egg, your hen may not lay for another day or two. When she does lay again, the egg will be larger and the color more firmly established.

If you pay attention to your hens, their behavior will let you know when they are getting ready to start laying eggs. The first is what I call the Egg March. Although the hens don’t know it, nature is getting them ready to lay. The Girls were about four months old when I noticed that at about the same time each day, all three hens, if loose in the yard or just hanging out in the coop, would resolutely march back into their henhouse. I peeked in on them to see what they were doing. They were standing around, taking turns digging in the nest box. Half an hour later, they’d go back into the yard, unsure why they’d left it in the first place.

The other thing a hen will do when she is about ready to lay (or when she’s just started laying) is squat down in a defensive posture, wings slightly away from her body, when you try to pet her. At first I thought my hens had developed a severe inferiority complex. Then I learned that this is the position a breeder takes when she’s getting ready to accept a mate. Mating, of course, is coincident with the production of eggs.

When a hen lays her first egg, she’s not sure what is happening to her. The urge to lay comes on suddenly. She will retreat to the nearest corner of the yard or coop. There, she will spend the next 15 minutes diligently digging a shallow hole. Once the hole is a depth acceptable to the hen, she will sit in it, tail to the wall, beak to the wind. Another 15 minutes go by, and she suddenly stands up and runs off as if nothing has happened. There sits your first egg, snuggled in a nest of fallen leaves and still hot to the touch!

If your hen starts laying in mid-summer, she will be pretty regular, with an egg every day or two. If a hen begins to lay in fall, or in winter after the fall molting, eggs won’t come so regularly — maybe two to four eggs each week. Hens lay better in warmer weather, and they slow down in the cold season. However, if the weather gets too warm and the hens can’t cool properly, their laying may be less consistent.