Best Nesting Boxes for Chickens: Rollout, Wood and Plastic Picks The best nesting boxes for chickens are the ones your hens will actually use: about 12 inches square inside, with a front lip that holds deep bedding, enough cover to…
Ten hens is where coop shopping stops being a purchase and becomes a building project, and the listings have not caught up with that fact. By the standard rule of 4 square feet of coop floor per hen, ten hens…
Almost every beginner regret I hear about starts the same way: the coop was bought or built in the wrong order. The boxes went in before anyone measured the floor. The hens arrived before the latches did. This chicken coop…
Short answer first: yes, you can keep chickens in a small backyard — if three gates all swing open. Gate one: your local rules allow hens. Gate two: you can honestly give each hen her minimum of 4 square feet…
Short answer first: most hens lay well for 2 to 3 years, taper through years 4 and 5, and many keep laying the occasional egg for 6 to 8 years of a life that often runs 8 to 10. Read…
Short answer first: the deep litter method means you stop cleaning your coop out and start composting in it. You lay down 4 to 6 inches of dry, carbon-rich bedding, then instead of stripping it weekly you keep adding fresh…
Here is the thing about baby chicks: they arrive on a date you chose weeks ago, they come out of the box hungry, thirsty and cold, and they grow at a speed that will genuinely surprise you. There is no…
Short answer first: for most backyard coops, the best chicken coop bedding is large-flake pine shavings — cheap to replace, properly absorbent, light to handle and compostable when it is done. The honest one-liners for the other two: straw is…
A brooder is not really a product. It is five ordinary things working together: a safe box the chicks cannot get out of, a heat source at one end, bedding underfoot, chick feed, and clean water. Everything sold as a…
A frozen waterer is never just a frozen waterer. A hen drinks roughly twice as much water as she eats feed by weight — the numbers are in our guide to how much chickens eat and drink a day —…
