Essential shopping list for new chicken keepers

Our chickens are pets first and cute little egg factories second.  This means that we've spent a fair bit more than the bare minimum to make sure our girls have a nice life.  We've also tried to get things that will look good in our garden.

Most of what you need is available on Amazon, so the links below show where you can get them.  For many things this will be the cheapest option, but for some you will get better deals elsewhere.  If you have a good farm supply shop near you, you'll get most stuff you need at top prices there.  Pet shops will stock many items but prices will tend to be significantly higher.

If you're going to order a lot of this stuff from Amazon, it may be worth getting Amazon Prime to save on delivery costs.

Housing

First things first, your chooks will need somewhere to live.  They're going to need space, security and comfort.

Coops with an integrated run are a great idea for those of us who have to work for a living.  This gives you easy access to the eggs and once the pop door is shut, the coop itself is fox-proof, warm, cosy and windproof.

The run gives them some safe space to move around while we're out at work.  I wouldn't want to leave the hens in this run 24/7 because it's not really enough space to keep them happy.  Ours get free access to the whole garden as soon as we get in from work each day and all weekend, so a run like this is good enough for them.  If you're planning to keep them locked up all the time, you'll want to consider a bigger enclosure.

It's also very important to make sure that your run is fox-proof.  A nice sturdy run with thick wire mesh is a good start, but foxes can dig, so it's recommended to put paving slabs around the run.  While foxes are happy to dig under the edge of a fence, they won't tunnel all the way under a paving slab.

This coop is now a major feature of your garden, so you'll want it to look nice and make sure it doesn't rot.  We used Cuprinol in blue and white.

Food and water

Now that the chickens have somewhere to live, they'll need to eat and drink.

We got some fairly cheap plastic feed and water dispensers, which we hang from the roof of the run with bungee cords.

Tap water is fine for them to drink, although some people say you should collect rain water for them as it's more natural.

The standard feed recommendation is layers pellets .  These are designed to be a complete nutritional balance for chickens and will provide most of what they need.  You'll also want to give them treats, but we'll get to that later.

Chickens don't have any teeth, so they eat small stones which sit in their gizzards and help to grind up the food.  They'll naturally scratch around and find stones to eat, but it's best to make sure they have a plentiful supply.  A good idea is to get grit that's mixed with oyster shells , as the extra calcium helps the hens to produce good strong egg shells.

The pellets and grit will supply all the essential nutrients to keep your chickens healthy, but you'll probably also want to give them treats.  Not only do treats make them happy and entertain you watching them run after anything you throw, but a good varied diet makes a massive difference to the quality and flavour of your eggs.

If your chickens are free ranging, they'll find a lot of variety for themselves.  They'll eat grass and other plants and scratch in the ground for worms and bugs.  They'll eat mice and frogs if they can catch them, steal cat or dog food and generally have a peck at anything you happen to drop in the garden.

Most fruit and veg get a good reaction.  We've found that our girls particularly like tomatoes, melon, apple, potato (make sure you cook it first) and broccoli.  Corn is a good treat that you can control well if you want to train your chickens.  We have found that putting it in an old parmesan dish allows us to open and close the lid so we can use it as a treat for being a good girl.

The one thing guaranteed to get the little critters running at you though is sardines.  They're great nutrition, cheap and chickens love them.  They're a good source of protein for egg production, the soft bones give calcium for shell and feather production and they're full of omega-3 oils for a nice rich yolk.  Make sure you get them in either oil or tomato, not in brine as the salt is bad.

Cleaning and medical

Now that you've got all this food going in to your chickens, the bad news is that not all of it comes out in the form of eggs.  Chickens poo a lot, everywhere.  I really do mean a lot.

Your first weapon against the poo is a good choice of bedding.  Some people use straw, although that can harbour parasites.  Shredded paper could work, and I could get it free from my office, but it's not very absorbent and tends to be a big tangled mess, so hard to clean up.  Some use woodchips, which you may be able to get free from a local gardener, but again not that absorbant.  We use Aubiose Pet Bedding.   It's absorbent, easy to scoop up the poop and it composts down well.

The good news is that chicken poo isn't like other bird poo.  It's much bigger, like something you'd expect from a small dog.  Nine times out of ten, it's a big solid lump and very easy to just scoop up into a dustpan.  We found that a small coal shovel is ideal for that job.  That's all very well nine times out of ten, but the tenth time... your first cecal poo will come as a surprise.  They're soft and kind of look like caramel sauce.  They really don't smell like caramel sauce though.  No chance scooping these, you're going to need a hose .

Once you've scooped up all this poo, you need to put it somewhere.  Gardeners will tell you that chicken manure makes some of the best compost around, so get some compost bins.  Most local councils will have some kind of subsidised deal on these, so it's worth shopping around.  We got two of the big ones, and I'm starting to think that two will only just be enough for the amount produced by our four little poo factories.

Once a week, you'll want to completely change the bedding in your coop.  This is a good time to give things a good clean to keep the parasites away.

A good squirt of Poultry Shield all round should disinfect everything nicely.  You'll want to get a spray bottle to mix this up in.  Once the poultry shield has dried, new bedding goes in and everything (including the hens) gets liberally dusted with diatomaceous earth powder (DE) .  This is to guard against the dreaded red mite.  Pay special attention to the perches to make sure the nasty little bugs can't get to your girls in the night.

The ground in the run gets sprinkled with Stalosan F powder to kill off any internal parasites like worms that may be lurking there.

It's good to have a pot of vaseline to hand.  When you first get your hens, there might be some squabbling to establish the pecking order, so a good smear of vaseline on the comb and wattles is good so they can't grab each other and do any damage.  It's also good on very cold nights to prevent frostbite on the combs.

Purple spray is needed for any injuries.  Occasionally the chickens will get hurt, whether fighting, in accidents or just plucking out a feather and there will be a small amount of blood.  Chickens love blood (and anything red) and will peck at a wound and make it much worse.  A quick dose of purple spray stops it being quite so attractive and is also an effective antiseptic.

Many people will tell you to put apple cider vinegar (ACV) in the water supply.  It's supposed to be a mild antiseptic due to being acidic and may have some other trace nutrients.  I haven't managed to find any rigorous evidence that it actually works and studies conducted when it was a fad for humans a few years ago showed no beneficial effects, however it doesn't do any harm, so why not?

Storage

All the food you're storing could attract vermin, so it's important to have somewhere secure to store it.  Rats will chew through a plastic bin, so get some metal ones .

You'll also want somewhere to store everything else, so a garden storage box is a good idea unless you have a lot of spare shed space.

That should be just about everything you need to get yourself started.  Once you get into it all, you might decide to get some toys, a more comfy garden chair to watch them from, new eggcups...  But that's all for another post.

Poorly Piper

One of our hens has been a little under the weather.  On Friday evening, when I let the girls out into the garden for a run around, three of them immediately started searching for goodies while Piper stood off to one side with her neck pulled in, looking very unhappy.

I got the corn bowl out, as this usually gets them all running over.  I immediately had Norma and Taystee on my lap and Big Boo scratching around by my feet, but no reaction from Piper.

I took the corn over to Piper and held it in front of her - nothing.

I put some treats out for the others and took Piper inside with me to watch The Simpsons and recuperate.  I put a bowl of corn on one side of her and a bowl of honey water on the other.  She ignored both and just sat down for a bit.  I had a feel of her neck and found that the crop was empty - she hadn't eaten all day.  I was starting to get really worried.

After about an hour of chilling out, she stood up and started straining at something.  About 20 minutes later she laid a perfectly-formed but shell-less egg.  It's an odd thing, still held together by a membrane, but squidgy, like a stress ball.

After laying, she took a nap for 10 minutes, woke up, had a look around and... OOH! CORN!  Started gobbling away at the food.  Looks like it was just the egg getting her down; she perked right up once it was out of the way.

Piper has been back to her normal self the last couple of days.  We had a very thin shelled egg yesterday which was probably her.  Not ideal, but definitely an improvement.

Great British Beak Off

Egg update:

37 eggs.  Average 2.1 per day.  £13.40 per egg.

Food

Ooh, pineapple!

Now that worming week is over, the girls are allowed treats again, so we're trying them on a variety of stuff.

I think they're starting to get used to me providing food.  When I come out the back door, they cluster round me and follow me around the garden.  Anything I drop, they try to eat.  When I'm hanging out the washing, if I drop a peg, they all run over and try to eat it.

This means they're up for trying most things.  If it turns out not to be food, they'll soon lose interest.

We tried them on green beans and mushrooms, not much interest there.

Fruit is popular.  We've tried melon, mango and Pineapple .  They're quite happy to strip any remaining flesh that we might have left on the rind.

Corn is a classic chicken treat and our girls love it.  I can see it will be a good tool for training them.  I found an old parmesan bowl in the cupboard and decided it would make a good corn bowl, as I can open and close it one-handed.  Using this, I've managed to get three of the girls to jump up on my lap to get some treats.  This includes Piper who was quite aggressive to begin with but is now becoming very tame.  She'll jump up on my lap and put up with being stroked and checked over, so long as there's corn on offer.

The only one who isn't jumping up for the corn is Big Boo.  She always seems a bit aloof and is now the only one who shies away from being touched.  She's happy to eat whatever scraps the other drop, but still doesn't trust me enough to come up.  Hopefully that'll come in time.

So far we've found two things that they really go mad for: rose petals and sardines .

There's a rose bush hanging over the fence from next door.  Every time a petal drops, they all run over and fight over it.

By far the favourite is sardines.  I emptied a tin onto the grass at the weekend and I've never seen them move so fast.  They cleared up the sardines in seconds and proceeded to strip out every blade of grass they touched.  Sardines are very good for egg production, due to the protein, calcium and omega-3 content, so this will become a regular treat for them now.

Great British Beak Off

Finally, our tribute to the Great British Bake Off: The Great British Beak Off.  It's starting to trend on the chicken-related Facebook groups and here's our entry for this week:

A pineapple shell stuffed with blanched potatoes, gammon and a baked eggshell crumb.

Prepared last night and in the fridge ready for judging this evening...