Chicken Keeping for Beginners, Part 1: Space and Housing

hello and welcome to the chicken pen during this year I've shown lots of videos on the breeding season for our Buff Orpington chickens you might be looking at them and thinking you'd like to keep chickens too so this is the first in a series of videos this just for you so join me on this journey [Music] hello my name's Fiona this series of videos is designed to show you lots of different aspects of chicken keeping now it's not intended to dictate how you should keep your chickens what I'll do is I'll show you various things which we considered and the options that we chose as a result and tell you why we didn't choose other options what we chose may not be right for you but it'll give you hopefully enough information to make the right choice for you and your chickens so join me and we'll cover this first aspect which is space and housing let's talk about space and I'd love to show you around our chicken enclosure and we're lucky enough to have a field right beside our house and Gardens so let's have a walk around and I'll show you what we've got the first big consideration for us was not to set up the enclosure as one large square a rectangle we've set it up in a series of small sections this allows us to throw a small fence across the entrance to each section so if we need to isolate any hands or small group of hens we can do that easily it might be just to observe them they may be ill they may be behaving strangely and it just makes life so much easier we've got lots of shelters sand baths areas they can hide from each other run away from each other playing and it's all very irregular the second thing we want to consider was that we want to keep chicken on grass so we need to give a huge area chickens are very destructive they eat the grass and they scratch it up and the grass doesn't grow in winter so when we go down to a dozen chickens during the winter season it needs to be large enough that the grazing doesn't take the grass away and in summer when we breed up and get to an average of 40 heads the grass is going to be enough to stand up to that many chickens eating it let me introduce you to Barbie in her two chicks who are going to give us a very practical demonstration on just how destructive chickens can be to grass and grassy areas she's teaching her chicks to hunt for grubs and for worms and teaching them to graze at the same time she's scratching out grass she's scratching out thatch and you can start to see areas of bare earth starting to appear one of the reasons for allowing your chickens to graze is that greenery provides something called carotenoids these make the yolks of the eggs from your chickens incredibly creamy and rich there was no big deal if your chickens don't have access to grass because you can still get this creaminess by supplementing the diet with cabbage or broccoli or chard or other greenery that you have in the garden so it's not the end of the world but it's easier if you just have grass available and that's what we chose to do this is one of the areas that we're actually repairing and all we do is surround it with some wire mesh which has held into the ground with bamboo canes so the chickens can't get through to any seed we receded we water every day and that repairs these patches just because we've got a very large area doesn't mean that we don't repair the grass at all due to chicken damage it just means that they still have access to grass elsewhere in the enclosure a very important aspect to consider is shade and shelter for your chickens I'm actually stood under a tree because our chicken enclosure as kept in the orchard so all of the chickens have foliage cover in summer to keep the hot beating Sun off them they also have the added advantage that they've got fallen fruits such as cherries and apples and plums that they can just munch away on when they hit the ground now if you don't have the advantage of an orchard or tree cover that the chickens can be provided with you could provide artificial shelters like this one behind me it's just a basic wooden structure but what it does do is when it's raining it stops chickens getting absolutely soaked now the not always that clever sometimes they will just stand out in the rain but if they really don't want to be cold wet and miserable they go inside these shelters and stay a little bit dry if you have a run attached to your coop you could simply put a piece of tarpaulin over one end but make sure it's secure sir is not flapping around because that will actually scare hands there's lots of different ways that you can provide shade and shelter for your chickens so let's take a closer look at this first design of shelter it's too simple a frames join together with a small platform and a perch on top and as you can see tango is demonstrating the benefit of this little shelter arrangement they do like being in here to seek shelter from the Sun this is another design which is really simple to make it's a straightforward box construction with one side open and the roof is extended to provide a little lip to keep the rain off when it's really pouring down again this is another shelter that the chickens spend a lot of time in particularly when it's raining because it does keep them dry you wouldn't believe how many big Buff Orpington chickens can actually fit in this very small shelter is quite surprising as part of their daily health care routine chickens need to clean themselves humans have showers and baths and use water to take dirt away kids do something completely different they'll use dry substances either soil or sand to scrub away excess grease from their feathers and also to take anyway mites or creepy crawlies are hiding inside their feathers here we've added giant tractor tires with red builder sand and two of our chickens are hardly scrubbing themselves if you don't have the advantage of this kind of space you could add a plantar's gravel tray into your run fill it with sand and your chickens can use that to clean themselves if the run is small that all the grass has been removed they'll just dig a hole in the soil and clean themselves that way some owners if they're cleaning the coop out every single day and removing feces and the poop that they put in there they'll have diatomaceous earth into their wood shavings inside the coop and the chickens will use that to clean themselves there are lots of alternatives I admit that our chickens are completely spoiled we've got a second sand bath with a tractor tire red builder sand but this time we put a cover over it it's nothing fancy it's part of my old swing seat with some corrugated metal sheeting over the top so that the Builder stands stays dry even in the wettest weather let's talk about housing for your chickens when we started keeping chickens we bought coops and we now make them but I thought let's start with one that we bought this is a design that is widely commercially available on the far side it's got a nest box which runs the entire length of the coop and it's got this great bit on this side of this two hatches which come down and allow you to easily get in and clean the coop you need to be able to scoop the poop if you can't do it easily it becomes very very difficult to clean out the other thing I particularly like about this coop is has got an up-and-down door and it's got space at the top for this little gray box now this is something we've added on and this is a unit which is an auto opener and it's made by company called chicken God there are others on the market but we do prefer chicken guards it can be programmed to close and open based on light levels so in mid-summer when it's light at 4 a.m. you can program it so that it opens and let your chickens out as soon as it's dawn and in the depth of winter if you're not home from work to shut those chickens up the door comes down when it's dusk and your chickens are all safe what this does it means that you have better protection from any predators like foxes or Badgers that an open door can just be an invitation so we love these absolutely recommend them do think about it no tango this is another coop that we've got and it's got one big advantage over the last coop that you saw it's actually on wheels and it has these wheelbarrow handles at the front which allow us to lift it up and move it around the enclosure now this was made by a local carpenter so it's not commercially available but we do like the fact that it's on wheels and we stole this idea when we started to make our own coops a little bit later on the big downside and disadvantage of the last clip that you saw is the door as you can see it's a simple flap arrangement which actually means we can't put an auto open or closed on it so it's a little less secure for the chickens we tend to use this as a last resort so it will be used for isolating any chickens which are a little bit ill and needs to be observed and kept away from the others or it might be used if we've got lots and lots of broody hens and we're running out of coops but it will be one of the last ones who will actually use out of choice so this is the very first coop that my great husband made for us he's given an up-and-down door so we can put an altar opener on it he's put it on wheels so we can move it around and there's wheelbarrow handles at the back so it can easily be moved around the enclosure there's one nest box at the back Oh before painters love to sleep together in one great big mass of feathers and they also like to lay their eggs together one very important aspect for us is this opening root and it opens on one side and there's essential struts which comes out and also acts as a prop which means cleaning this coop is an absolute cinch it's so easy there Cindy's actually in here laying at the moment so I'm gonna close this up and leave her alone this was the next coop that was made the last one was made for a buff Orpingtons who prefer to actually sleep on the floor on the wood shavings that we give them for bedding this coop was made for our egg layers now they prefer to actually sleep and boost while perching in the spirit of smallholder mend and make do it was put onto the beds of an old trailer that we had so it can easily be moved around it's still on wheels and it's such a robust construction because it actually got a steel base but let me show you inside this coop the perches are very simple they're just two long bars either side of the coop that allow the chickens to perch and sleep and roost at night if they choose to sleep on the shavings they can go through the doorway on the left-hand side which leads to an sbox and they can cuddle up in there and sleep in a pile of feathers just like the buff Orpingtons do one thing we do need to talk about its ventilation is so important in your coats that stale air can get out and fresh air gets in this is what we've done and I would say please look out for ventilation any coop you buy we've put some steel mesh on the inside to stop any predators getting in and we've also fitted a slide which we can push across a little bit and we to keep the coop a little bit warmer and fully open it in summer to keep the coop a little bit cooler I hope you found that useful now don't forget this is a first and a series of videos about keeping chickens so do come back for the next installment if you would take a moment to give me a thumbs up if you'd like the content please do if there's anything in particular you want me to cover in this series leave me a comment and I'll do my best to make it happen if you haven't already subscribed please subscribe now and click the notifications icon to get to know any new videos we post including the next in the series thanks for watching and I really look forward to seeing you next time [Music] you [Music]

Channel: English Country Life

Views: 38,159

Rating: 4.9612231 out of 5

Keywords: bufforpington, orpington, chickens, hens, poultry, smallholder, smallholding, thegoodlife, teamfloof, homestead, homesteading, chickenkeeping, hen, buff orpington, chicken, small holding, chicken keep, chicken keeping uk, backyard chickens, urban chickens

Id: juvgmsalkbY

Length: 14min 15sec (855 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 03 2019