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Keeping Chickens for Eggs

Keeping chickens to produce eggs is a good introduction to keeping animals, or as a first step in becoming self sufficient. Chickens are relatively cheap, and easy to look after, as well as hopefully providing you with all the eggs you will need for your own consumption.

Firstly, let's start with a popular misconception-lots of people believe that for a chicken to lay eggs you need to have a rooster or cockerel, but this isn't so. To produce eggs for food purposes only then all you need is a chicken.

One thing you will need is somewhere for your chickens to roost at night, and to be safe from foxes and other predators, so a hen house is vital. The birds will shelter from bad weather there and will usually lay their eggs in the hen house too.
There are various hen houses you can buy. Some are pretty expensive and quite complex in the way they are built and laid out, while others are very simplistic and inexpensive to buy or build. Quite often a simple hen house is the best, especially for someone new to keeping chickens. There are a couple of reasons chickens can be pretty messy tenants and a simple hen house is very easier and quicker to clean than a complex one with lots of different partitions and compartments. All a henhouse really needs to have is a bottle of drinking water, some clean washing up basins filled with straw, to act as nesting boxes and a couple of roosting rails.

For an average family of four people about six hens should be enough. This will mean you'll get six eggs a day maximum, on average four, but less in winter. When hens get broody they tend not to lay and prefer to try and hatch the eggs they've already laid, so it won't be very often you will get the maximum. Most chickens come in heavy, bantam and miniature sizes and will all lay eggs. They will eat grain, cornflakes, and anything that they can forage. You should also try and feed them specialist grit whish is available from feed suppliers.

Usually locking your chickens up at night is adequate protection from things like foxes. Because grain is used in feeding, this normally attracts rats, so some sort of pest control is needed. The rats wont harm the chickens, but they do carry disease and so need to be controlled. Collect your eggs on a regular basis and write on them in pencil the date laid, so you can rotate and eat them in the correct order. Once you start to eat fresh eggs regularly, you won't want to go back to eating supermarket bought eggs.

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