If you want the perfect pet, both a wonderful companion for the children as well as a productive pet then the obvious solution is to keep chickens. Chickens make a great pet for children, are fun to have around, will help clean up the garden of nasty pests and provide you with the perfect product to eat, namely free range eggs.
Some people assume that you can only keep chickens if you live in the countryside, but there are many people living in suburbia who delight in keeping chickens too.
The keeping of chickens is often subject to rules and regulations, for example it is often prohibited to keep roosters and there are also sometimes regulations about the number of chooks you may have and where your chicken house may be located.
But after you’ve found out what you can and cannot do there are no other reasons why dwellers of suburbia are unable to keep backyard chickens in suburbia.
I am often asked how many chickens to have and what breed of chickens to buy.
Of course this is, in both cases, a matter of personal choice, however as a general guideline you will find that a good layer will produce around 300 eggs per year. Or roughly 5 to 6 eggs per week. This will subside during the winter.
You can then look at how many eggs you require to determine how many chooks to keep.
But it’s extremely rare that you should have eggs going to waste. If you do simply ask the neighbours, they will fall all over themselves to buy your free range eggs.
On that basis, for the average family, 3 or 4 hens is usually sufficient, though more is more fun.
And then there is the question of what breed to buy and this depends on why you are keeping chickens. Are you keeping chickens for their looks or their eggs or their companionship?
Our children love fancy looking chickens and so we are the proud owners of some pure white silky bantams. Whilst they look wonderful and are fun to have around they lay small eggs, and not as many as some other breeds, and so are really only there for looks.
There’s no doubt they look great.
We have Isa Browns for their egg laying capacity. They do not sit on eggs very well and this means they are producing eggs for more days of the year, so are excellent layers. But they won’t hatch chicks for you.
Having chicks is a wonderful experience. Every time we do so our kids love it, and delight in watching the chicks grow up. There are some negatives to allowing your chickens to hatch chicks though, the main one being what to do with the chicks when they get older. Of course around 50 percent will be roosters and so you will need to find something to do with them. They make good soup, however you will need to consider the council regulations.
But those problems are minor when you consider the companionship value of keeping chickens, both for you and your children, as well as all those yummy eggs that you will get every day.
Peter has a website about chickens and chicken houses at http://www.chickenhouses.net.au
Tags: chicken house, chicken houses, hen house, hen houses
