How to House Chickens in Your Backyard
A Henhouse for Backyard Chickens
Have you always wanted to have chickens in your backyard and fresh eggs for breakfast? An increasing number of city and town backyards are now home to hens, but keeping chickens in your backyard is not always as easy as you’d like to think.
What About Clipping Chicken Wings?
Many people advise clipping the wings of backyard chickens to stop them from wandering. Wing clipping is certainly an option, but in my experience, it is too difficult for most new chicken owners to catch their birds and clip their wings effectively. It is not pleasant for the chickens and no fun for their owners.
Even if your chickens can’t fly, they can still cause mayhem and chaos in a suburban backyard. So, how will you protect your garden? A chicken run in the backyard attached to the hen’s house could be your best option.
Different Runs for Chickens in the Backyard
Choosing the best option from many different runs for chickens kept in backyards requires you to think carefully about your home, your yard, your family, and exactly what role your chickens will have in your life.
If you want to keep your chickens at a distance from your house, tucked away in the bottom of your backyard, you’ll need a different size and type of run than one chosen by a family intending to keep chickens as pets.
Do you have cats in your own home or nearby houses and fear they may attack your chickens even during daylight? Will your family dog adopt the chickens and keep them safe from predators? These are the kinds of issues you need to think through when assessing different runs for chickens in your backyard.
How Safe Is Your Backyard for Chickens?
What kind of chickens do you intend to keep, and how many? Do you expect your breed of hens to be adventurous and fly over fences into other backyards where they are not welcome? If so, you’ll need wire covering your chicken run. Or, perhaps you have your eye on ground-dwelling Silkies less likely to jump your boundary fences.
Free-ranging hens can happily wander unattended through a backyard and return to a small hen house to roost if that’s what suits your lifestyle. Lock them up at night to keep them safe from predators, and let them run free again each morning.
Step-by-Step Photo Guide: Building a Backyard Chicken House
The new hen house began with a raised platform at a convenient height for us to reach in and replace straw, and easily catch the chickens when necessary. No need to bend down to ground level. We painted the floor to seal it.
The frame of the hen house takes shape. We recycled one sheet of glass from an old oven door as a window. It is positioned at the height of the roosts, allowing us to check the chickens at night by shining a torch in.
The laying boxes extend out the side of the chicken house. We can access the eggs without needing to enter the hen house.
My husband demonstrates the convenience of being able to collect eggs from the laying boxes without having to bend down. 🙂
In various chicken houses we’ve had in the past, the entry has either been on ground level, involved a ramp or required a jump to a raised doorway. In this version we’ve decided to try them out with some stairs. No reason other than their amusement.
Corner posts for some of the fencing are made from trees, just like in days of old. The wire fencing and metal posts are recycled.
To the left is the fence of a vegetable garden freshly weeded by pig-power, waiting for spring planting. To the right is the new chicken run. The door to the chicken run is an old bed base from a camp bed.
If we need access to the inside of the chicken house, we don’t have to enter the chicken run. Recycled wood for door and laying boxes needs painting. The roofing iron yet to be finished.
The access door is at a convenient height. Removing straw will be easy with a shovel and a wheelbarrow.
We used two branches of slightly different thickness to create roosts.
One wall insulated. Metal strapping provides additional strength for the structure in high winds.
Photo by LongTimeMotherBackyard Chickens for Pest Control
Aside from the obvious advantage of fresh eggs for breakfast, keeping a couple of chickens in your backyard can help with pest control.
The variety of hens you choose will influence their effectiveness in your garden, but in theory, chickens can help control the following pests:
- Flies
- Fruitfly
- Mosquitoes
- Grasshoppers
- Millipedes
- Earwigs
- Scorpions
- Spiders
- Ticks
- Worms/caterpillars that attack apple trees, cherry trees, etc
- White cabbage moths and their larvae
The Disadvantages of Pecking and Scratching
Free-ranging chickens can be very effective pest controllers. To control pests, however, chickens do two things: They peck and they scratch. Big hens with big feet on strong legs can make a mess of garden beds as they scratch looking for worms and other food. Hungry chickens will peck and eat your lettuce and tomatoes and other foods growing in your garden as well as the caterpillars and flying bugs they may find on the leaves.
If you don’t want your chickens to have access to your entire backyard, you will need to build them a run. Your other option is to effectively fence your vegetable garden.
Springtime Changes to the Chicken House
Shade cloth for summer protects the entry ramp from excessive heat and also keeps their water tank shaded.
The entire length of the chicken run has been covered with nets to stop our top flyers from escaping and scratching up seedlings in the vegetable gardens. They will be set free again once the young plants are established.
With not a blade of grass left in the lengthy chicken run, we now provide them with food – including clumps of grass. Our hens love to free range and eat fresh greens – which is why our spring gardens are not safe. lol.
The stairs were fun for a while, but now that some of the hens are clucky and sitting on eggs we have replaced them with a ramp for easier entry and exit for baby chickens.
Fine-Tuning Your Hen House
It is difficult to anticipate precisely how your hens, roosters, and baby chicks will cope with changing seasons and their new living quarters, but there are a few obvious factors you’ll need to take into account.
Shelter From Rain and Sun
For instance, sometimes you’ll have heavy rain. The space beneath the hen house in our most recent design has proven extremely useful for the fowl to take shelter. Similarly, in the summer heat, there needs to be shelter from the sun. In addition to the space beneath their house, at the first sign of spring, we added blue shade cloth to provide additional cover over the fenced area near the entry.
Stairs for Adults, Ramps for Chicks
The stairs have been fun for the larger birds, but once winter passed, we replaced the steps with a ramp, one that was better suited to accommodate baby chicks.
Nets to Protect the Garden
In order to protect the seedlings in our vegetable gardens, we covered the entire chicken run in nets. (I am not a fan of clipping their wings.) Our poultry will be confined to their house and outdoor run until the gardens are safe for free-ranging again. Meanwhile, we bring clumps of fresh grass and other greens to them and treat them to grain and seeds.
Despite the general success of the original house and run design, we have definitely found a need for fine-tuning. Our free-ranging hens and roosters can fly over even the highest fences.
Best Backyard Chickens: Silkies
My best recommendation for anyone keeping chickens in the backyard for the first time is to choose Silkies. Begin with this small, friendly, well-behaved breed of chicken (compared other breeds), and then expand your flock with other varieties once you become more experienced and confident.
Top Reasons for Raising Silkies
Silkies offer many advantages if you want backyard chickens.
- Silkies rarely fly.
- They are not likely to be aggressive.
- They are lovely and soft to touch and hold.
- Their eggs are small but tasty.
Other Great Aspects of This Breed
Equally important:
- Silkies have feathers on their feet, so they are less likely to scratch your garden.
- Their size means they eat less if you are buying layer’s mash or pellets instead of letting them free-range.
- Silkies are good mothers and will even sit on a larger hen’s eggs. When the time comes to expand your flock, you can purchase fertile eggs for a Silkie to hatch.
- Silkie roosters are just as cute and lovely as the hens, unlike larger varieties whose roosters can be far more intimidating to inexperienced chicken owners.
- You don’t need a big backyard to raise Silkies.
Backyard Silkies
Two of my Silkies. One white hen with a rooster. They won’t be kept in the new chicken run because they cause no damage to our gardens and we simply lock them up in their own little house at night.
Another friendly fluff-ball chicken!
Silkie rooster.
Start with a Silkie and then add other larger hens. We have many varieties of chickens on our small farm.
How Many Backyard Chickens Do You Need?
If you are keeping backyard chickens for the first time, I strongly suggest you start with just two hens. You might have to buy extra eggs during the colder months, but you can always add more chickens to your backyard flock in future years. Most backyards can accommodate two chickens, and most families can cope with two eggs a day.
Before you rush out and buy six, eight, or ten cute little chicks to bring home and raise with the dream of supplying your family and friends with fresh eggs, I suggest you give thought to exactly what you will do with an excess of eggs during the peak laying season. Those of us who keep many hens know that there comes a time every year when you’re suddenly overwhelmed with more eggs than you can possibly use.
How to Deal With Too Many Eggs
In my home, when our chickens are busy laying one egg each per day, I write the date each egg is collected on the eggshell in pencil before putting it in the fridge. Instead of eating ‘the oldest eggs first’ as people tend to do when trained to look at use-by dates on supermarket products, we always eat the freshest first.
Any old eggs are fed to our pigs. But if you don’t have backyard pigs as well as backyard chickens, you may well find that during spring and summer you have too many eggs to give away and no real hope of eating them within the three months they’ll keep in your refrigerator. Scrambled eggs, boiled eggs, poached eggs, quiches . . . there are lots of ways you can eat them, but sooner or later everyone grows tired of too many eggs.
Check for Danger Before Locking Your Chickens Up at Night
- I locked a Brown Goshawk in with my chickens – How m…
I accidentally locked my poultry in their house with a hawk for a night, yet my chickens survived. Photos of the Brown Goshawk in the chicken run.
© 2013 LongTimeMother