by Sam E. Jones

Created on: October 22, 2010

More and more people are finding that keeping chickens for their eggs isn’t something that happens only on farms. It’s possible to keep chickens in the back yard too, if you’re willing to be diligent in their care.

To keep chickens for eggs you need a place to keep them, a coop of some sort, a means of keeping them from running off or being eaten by other animals, food and some water.

Because chickens are foragers, they don’t really take to living in a cage all the time, so you need to choose a spot in your yard or wherever it is you’d like to keep them where they can walk around on the ground. It doesn’t have to be a huge space, but it shouldn’t be tiny either. Also, never keep just one chicken as chickens need company to keep from getting too nervous, which halts egg production.

At any rate, what you do is pick out a section of your yard that will be dedicated to your chickens, then buy some chicken wire and encircle that area with it. You might need to put chicken wire over the top as well, depending on where you live. Consider that stay cats would love nothing more than to get in your chicken run and kill every one of them just for fun. Also make sure to have a way for you to get in and out of the run so that you can clean.

Next, buy or make a coop, which is like a little house for your chickens. Each chicken should have a private spot for resting and laying eggs and that spot should have clean straw on it to make it comfortable for the chicken, sort of like its nest.

After that you need to buy one or more of the new chicken deodorizer products, which are generally powders or wood chip mixtures. They work extremely well and are extremely important because you don’t want your neighbors to ever smell a thing. You should also sprinkle some small pebbles in the run for the chickens to swallow and use in the gizzards for digestion.

Next, get some chicken feed. You might have to order it online if you can’t find any locally. Purina actually makes a good mixture. You don’t need bowls for your feed though because they way you feed chickens is by tossing the feed all over the ground. Remember, chickens like to forage for their food. You do need to have a bowl for holding clean fresh water though, and depending on the weather, it might need either changing or refilling more than once on any given day.

After that, it’s just a matter of cleaning up the chicken poop pretty regularly, feeding and watering them, and of course, gathering the eggs every morning.

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