Happy raising chickens in your backyard for beginners

Happy raising chickens in your backyard for beginners

How to raising chickens for eggs in your own garden. 1x1 about feed, equipment, costs and care.

By Thorsten Hawk

Content

What you should know if you want to get chickens!

Chicken breeds at a glance

Araucana

Plymouth Rocks

Laying hens

Meat chickens

Twin chickens

Goals of keeping chickens

Chicken run and free range at the chicken coop

Chicken vivarium

Chicken coop size and number of chickens

Space requirement

Bedding and lighting

Feeder and drinker

Laying Nest

Chicken feed

Feed from own production

Chicken purchase and transport

How many roosters?

Selection of hatching eggs

Natural brood

Incubator

Chicks and rearing

Special features of rearing without hen

Chicken behavior

Care and daily routine

Laying performance and how to influence it?

Wintering and vacation

Common diseases and parasites

Vaccinations

Slaughter

The cost of keeping chickens

What you should know if you want to get chickens!

Saturday and Sunday for breakfast there should always be an egg for the whole family and during the week times quickly make a scrambled egg, there are quickly 10 eggs from a commercial package away. In addition, one hears in the news again and again from bad conditions on the farms where the chickens come from.

Since it would be perfect if you buy yourself a chicken farm in the garden to offer the animals a nice life and always have fresh eggs. But just buy a few chickens and pack the garden, is that possible? Shouldn't you first read up on chicken keeping in a book for beginners, so that you are optimally informed about what's coming up? The answer is yes, informing is the very first step.

Here in this guide we clarify you about all sorts of topics such as keeping chickens without a rooster or even that in chicken farming costs arise and especially which. So if you have a great interest in your own chickens, then be sure to read it through.

Chicken breeds at a glance

In the European breed poultry standard are listed over 180 different chicken breeds. Within each breed there are then again different color variants. However, the exact worldwide number of breeds can only be vaguely estimated, since not all chickens are statistically recorded and there are very many crossing possibilities.

All domesticated chicken breed descended from several wild chicken species.

If you want to choose one of the many breeds, you should know which breed is good for beginners, what should be the characteristics and laying performance of the chicken and what color and weight of the laid egg. For beginners there are about 10 breeds that are well suited.

Araucana

Araucana are chickens with very low requirements, which makes them very easy to keep. They can come to a weight of about 2 kilos and lay a maximum of 180 eggs per year. Araucana are very trusting and peaceful chickens.

Plymouth Rocks

Another well suited breed are the Plymouth Rocks. These chickens are also not very demanding, very hardy and also very trusting. Plymouth Rocks grow up to 2.5 kilograms and lay up to 190 eggs a year, even in winter.

If you want a little more laying performance, the Sundheimer are well suited, they lay up to 200 eggs a year. With the Barnevelder is the great advantage that this breed does not fly, which significantly facilitates free-range husbandry.

The choice of which breed is right, is also made subsequent other criteria:

Laying hens

When breeding laying chickens, attention is paid to the laying performance of the chickens, which means that they should lay as many eggs per year as possible. The meat yield, fattening ability and weight play a subordinate role in this type of chickens during breeding. Laying chickens are often visually distinguished by the fact that they have small, slender and usually very muscular bodies.

Meat chickens

The chicken, what ends up on our plate, in most cases, is always a meat chicken. They are characterized by the fact that they are significantly heavier than other types of chickens. Meat chickens weigh 3.5 kilograms to 5.5 kilograms. Due to their increased weight, they tend to be less active and sluggish, unlike laying chickens or broilers. Meat chickens raised in a species-appropriate manner have dark, muscular meat and a fairly high fat content. If you want to keep this type of chickens privately, special fattening feed is not necessary.