Keep Chickens!: Tending Small Flocks in Cities, Suburbs and Other Small Spaces (4 page)

One final note. While referring to
chickens
throughout this book, what I actually mean is
hens
, because roosters usually aren’t allowed within city and town limits and outlying areas. So, when I mean
rooster
, I’ll say
rooster
; otherwise, I mean
hen
.

The number one misconception about keeping chickens is that chickens are difficult and time consuming to care for. I’ve had parakeets. I have chickens. The chickens are easier. They’re also more practical (ever bake with parakeet eggs?) and physically heartier (chickens don’t drop dead in slight drafts).

Like dogs, cats, and other household pets, chickens have basic needs: shelter, food, proper sanitation, and some exercise. But once a small flock of chickens is established in your yard, for the most part all you’ll have to do is watch them and eat their eggs. The biggest investment of time for your chickens comes at the front end of the flock — designing and building chicken facilities.

A chicken’s home is composed of the
coop
(a fenced outdoor area for chickens) and the
henhouse
(a small shelter located inside the coop). The size and style of the coop and henhouse depend on your creativity, your available yard space, the setback requirements of city code, and the number of hens you expect to keep.
Chapter 5
offers advice and instructions for building a coop and henhouse.

The henhouse and coop should have clean, dry bedding material to absorb moisture and odor. I recommend spreading a layer of cedar chips and topping it off with a layer of chopped straw. The combination of cedar and straw absorbs moisture, cancels out some of that “fresh barnyard smell,” and is easy to muck out. Depending on the weather, and no less than once a week, the coop and henhouse will need to be cleaned out. Cleaning the coop takes no more time than cleaning out a hamster cage or bathing your dog. See
chapter 7
for details.

Chicken chores boil down to keeping the coop and henhouse clean, providing plenty of fresh food and water, and collecting eggs.

You’ll have to check every day to make sure the chickens have plenty of food and water. The best way to ensure your hungry hens never want for food is to fill a large stainless-steel feeder several times a week with chicken feed. Of course, it’s also fun to hang out with your chickens and hand-feed them table scraps (plain breads, pastas, vegetables, and certain fruits). Your hens’ ravenous appreciation won’t go unnoticed.

Although not known for being great athletes, chickens do like their daily exercise. For this reason, a roomy coop is important. Chickens should have plenty of space to dig, dust themselves, and flap their wings. But even if you have a spacious coop, you should let your chickens out into a fenced-in section of your yard a couple of times a week, even if only for a couple of hours before sundown. They will run, flap, hunt for bugs, and otherwise entertain you. Who needs television?

One of the reasons for keeping a small flock of chickens is the delicious eggs you will get. Fresh eggs are rich. Fresh eggs are fabulous. Fresh eggs
rule!
Once you’ve tasted one of your hens’ eggs fresh from your own garden, store-bought eggs will forever after taste bland and light. Some people — especially those raised on a lifetime of commercial eggs — think this yolky decadence is too rich to eat. If you are one of these people, then you can give away the eggs and simply enjoy the chickens. But if you’re like me, you’ll become a fresh egg snob that gazes upon commercial eggs with patronizing tolerance at best, and with outright mockery on days when you are feeling a wee bit cranky.

Why am I wild about fresh eggs? Just crack one open and take a look. You’ll notice first, in trying to break open the egg, that the shell is resilient and tough to crack. You can use a bit of strength when cracking a fresh egg; it won’t collapse in your hand like those thin-skinned commercial eggs.

Crack the fresh egg into a heated pan bubbling with butter. Your eye will go right to the yolk. Oh, the yolk! If you’re a yolk person, like me, you’ll be amazed by the bulging round mound of yolk that stands tall in your fresh egg. You’ll be entranced by the much darker and bolder color of the yolk — it’s more orange than yellow. Then the egg white gets your attention. Rather than thinning out and waning away from that robust yolk, the egg white holds its own in the frying pan. It’s more viscous than its commercial counterpart and spreads more slowly. As it cooks, it becomes the whitest egg white you’ve ever seen. Fork it in, and you’ll see that it tastes as buttery as it looks.

The freshness of homegrown eggs fills out the flavor of your cooking. Cakes and omelets come out with more flavor and a denser, richer texture. Pancakes taste sweeter, and custards are silkier.

Poultry Tribune,
circa 1940.

Chicken eggs are as chickens eat. Feed your chickens organic pellets and scratch, and you will have organic eggs. Nonorganic chicken-laying feed is also available — at $5 less per 50-pound (23 kg) bag, your hens will get all the nutrition they need, and your eggs will be fresh, though not technically organic. Toss in some kitchen scraps like leftover greens, vegetables, fruits, and a little day-old bread and pasta. Your chickens will be so happy that they will make their eggs taste even better for you!

A note about the term
organic:
There are relative degrees of organic, as specified by recent federal regulation. Basically,
organic
means something grown without the use of pesticides or other synthetic chemical agents. You may consider your eggs to be organic because you are “growing” them in your backyard, even if you are feeding your hens the less expensive nonorganic feed. Organic purists would argue that organic eggs are truly so only if the hens are fed only certified organic feed, are fed no nonorganic scraps, eat no grass or weeds from a nonorganic lawn, and receive no antibiotic treatments. You, in turn, might want to pull out your hair. In truth, at this time in our history, the definition of organic is not only relative but also personal. The bottom line is that if you feed your chickens a healthy, balanced diet, the eggs they lay for you will always be sweet and tasty.

Hens lay an egg about every 25 hours. Sometimes they skip a day of egg laying. (They skip several days or weeks of egg laying when they molt in the fall.) It’s usually nothing to worry about, unless accompanied by visible symptoms of discomfort or unusual behavior. Sometimes Lucy will skip two days of laying, then lay two eggs the following day. The other two hens will skip a day here and there. Altogether, the Girls provide me with up to 20 eggs per week. Counting the cost of their feed, that works out to about 50¢ per dozen of fresh brown eggs.

Most hens lay brownish eggs, sometimes with a pink, red, orange, or lavender hue. You can tell what color egg a hen will lay by the color of her ears (yes, chickens have ears). They are located behind and slightly below a chicken’ eyes and can be partially feathered over. If you gently push the feathers aside, you will see the skinlike texture of the ear opening. This color roughly corresponds to the color of the eggs the hen lays. Hens with reddish or pink ears will lay brown eggs; pale-eared chickens lay white eggs.

Zsa Zsa, my Barred Plymouth Rock hen, lays slim, dark pink eggs with a brownish tinge and a flat finish. The eggs of other Rocks I’ve seen ranged in color from light to very dark pink; some had a shiny, not flat, finish. My Rhode Island hen, Lucy, lays reddish brown eggs with tiny brown speckles. Whoopee, the Australorp, lays glossy eggs that are brown with dark red and orange hues. After collecting several days’ worth of eggs, I put the bounty in a white ceramic bowl on my dining room table, where the mound of fresh eggs glows like a multifaceted brown-hued jewel.

Check the henhouse daily for eggs and, if you can, collect them promptly after they are laid. They need to be brought in and refrigerated within the day to prolong their freshness. See
chapter 7
for more information on egg handling.

Having fresh eggs is a joy and a privilege. A joy because nothing else tastes like a fresh egg, and a privilege because not everyone enjoys the company of hens like my friends and I do. As more folks discover how easy and rewarding it is to keep chickens and it again becomes common to keep a garden flock, I hope for more egg joy and less egg privilege for everyone.

In deference to folks who may not like eggs or who are allergic to them, forgive the egg-centric tenor of the preceding paragraphs. For you folks, bird beauty, not egg production rates, is reason enough to have an urban flock. You can appreciate your chickens as pets and mobile lawn décor and also give the gift of eggs to family and friends.

Chickens love bug hunting. More to the point, they live for bug hunting — it’s a hen’s Holy Grail. Something about digging up a plump worm or juicy beetle drives the Girls crazy. Which is fine by me, as I am not particularly fond of worms, beetles, or any other wriggly or creepy life-forms that could potentially crawl up my pant legs or into my ears.

Since I started keeping chickens, the pest population in my garden has noticeably decreased. Creepy crawlies cower in fear before the Girls. Earwigs, centipedes, and beetles shake on all their legs as my hens thunder up to the rock or dirt hill concealing the unfortunate insects. A flip of the beak, and bugs be gone. More protein for the Girls, fewer bugs for me to squash. A perfect match, and I can’t think of a more natural approach to pest control.

However, when the Girls are out controlling pests in the garden, I have to control the Girls. In the excitement of the hunt, my bell-bottomed ladies can trample a garden plot of lettuce in three minutes flat. You wouldn’t think that a bird or two could be so hard on a garden, but the Girls are no canaries! When you let your chickens range free in your yard, you may want to fence off — permanently or temporarily — anything you don’t want crushed, dug up, or eaten. Or you can plant a garden resilient to chickens, such as a hardy, drought-resistant lawn bordered by evergreen arborvitaes, spiny conifers, and some rocks. (I’m exaggerating, but you get the idea.)

About pesticides — I no longer use them. I don’t need to, because the Girls get the bugs. And because the Girls eat the bugs, I don’t use pesticides; the chemicals might harm them. Chickens pick at and taste everything. So if you use pesticides or lawn or flower fertilizer in the garden, keep your hens in the coop for a few days afterward until the chemical additives have been absorbed or thoroughly washed away.

Whoever thought I’d be singing the praises of chicken poop? I am, and I’m not the only one. Chickens are walking nitrogen-rich manure bins. The Girls’ manure is the envy of my gardening friends. When I fluff up the Girls’ coop, I take the generous deposits of chicken guano and straw from beneath their sleeping perch and put it right in the compost bin. I store my leftover guano straw in extra trash cans that my friends line up for and haul away for their own compost bins. Nitrogen is an essential ingredient in great compost, and chickens are just full of it!

In the winter, I throw the guano-laced straw right on top of the fallow vegetable gardens. Then I let the Girls out into the yard, and they beeline right for the vegetable patches, where they spend glorious hours searching for bugs in the soft soil and digging the compost materials deep into the dirt.

Some chicken keepers put their flock in a small mobile pen to create a movable compost bin. They move the pen in the yard every few weeks, bringing it to areas where the soil needs to be worked and amended. The chickens till their own nitrogen-rich guano into the soil of the pen, fertilizing the land directly under their living quarters. These types of pens are best suited to larger yards that can accommodate a roving 3' x 4' x 2' (91 x 122 x 61 cm) structure.