Plastic Chicken Coops - Your questions answered.

Transcript: 
Hello everybody so today's quick video is as the title would suggest, all about the question, should I keep chickens? And we're going to try and do a quick five pointer about things that I would suggest that you think about before you delve into keeping chickens. I have had quite a few friends say to me, I'm thinking about getting chickens, how difficult are they to keep, is there anything I should know? So I just thought I'd try and cover that off as quickly as possible in a quick five pointer. So if you're watching this video then your mind is probably already made up and you're probably, like I did, decided that you're getting chickens and no one is going to talk you out of it, but I just want to raise a couple of things that you may or may not have thought about.
Okay so point one is for me all about garden space. So you don't have to have a really big garden by any stretch of the imagination and I'm not suggesting you can't keep chickens if you don't live on a small holding or a farm. We don't, we live in a two-bed semi-detached house in a semi-rural location and with a fairly average sized garden, and we do keep chickens quite successfully. I've got a flock of seven and so but all I would say is just consider the fact that if you have a very well maintained and very well manicured garden, keeping chickens is potentially going to stop that. So there's a couple of different options with keeping chickens. You can either keep them in a static coop and run, which is what we've done and we've actually dedicated part of our garden to that. The downside being, that does, the run area does get quite messy and does need topping up with new surfacing on quite a regular basis. I'll do another video on the best flooring for chicken runs at a later date. Thrilling, I'm sure you can't wait for that one. The other options are that you can free-range your chickens during the day and just pop them away at night or you can get a smaller more mobile chicken run and chicken coop situation, which some people do quite successfully and you can move that around the garden so that they're trashing different points of the garden rather than just trashing one continuously. We did free-range our chickens for a while and but they really do, you know chickens are quite destructive and if you're not aware of that it is worth pointing out that their natural instinct is to be pecking and clawing at the ground, more than I ever anticipated. So if you have a well manicured garden and you'd like to keep it that way, I would probably suggest that you don't keep your chickens free-ranging because they do tend to make a bit of a mess. So that's probably the first thing to consider and the first thing to consider is your set up.
So point two then for me has to be about noise. So when I first started looking into chickens I do really wish that someone had said to me, you do realize the chickens are quite noisy and I don't think anyone did say that to me at the time. I was very much of the assumption that I was just planning on having hens, I wasn't planning on having and having any cockerels and that would mean that they were all and pretty quiet and not very noisy, but that isn't the case. We do have, I'm very lucky I do have very accepting neighbours. One neighbour on one side used to keep chickens herself and is looking to get some as well, and the other neighbour, so far touch wood hasn't said anything about the noise, but what I would like to reiterate is if you think I'm just getting hens, I'm not getting a cockerel, there's not going to be any noise from my chickens, to just think again, because chickens do like to have a bit of a chatter and it's quite sweet sometimes, you have that sort of constant chippering away, but also it's worth noting that especially in the spring and summer time when they've laid an egg or if something is in the garden like a cat that's scared them, they do make a hell of a noise. So that would be my point, if you haven't thought about it and you haven't considered that already as part of factor into whether you want to keep chickens or not. just factor in the fact that they can be a bit noisy.
So then point three for me would be chickens aren't just for spring. We've all seen the lovely pictures of chickens chippering about in the fresh green grass with the Sun on their backs or having a nice sun bath, and that's lovely, but chickens do require care spring, summer, autumn and winter, so whether it's freezing cold outside and dark and windy and rainy, or snowy or frosty, chickens still need the same level of care. They still need to be fed and watered. So for us we have two water drinkers and a large feeder for our flock of seven. The feeder will probably last, so ours are fed adlib, again there will be another video on chicken feeding and what to feed chickens and what they need from a food point of view, so subscribe to my channel if you're thrilled already about that video too. That does need topping up quite regularly and the water pretty much every other day. In this time of year, spring and summer you can get away with cleaning them out in the coop area probably twice a week whereas this time of year it's literally every other day, every couple of days, keeping on top of keeping that clean. If you don't have a good set up with floodlights in your garden maybe you need to consider that as well because you do need good lighting. If you're like me and work full-time, I'm up early in the morning, either at the gym or out with the dog and then back late in the evening, and that means that the time that I am outside and able to deal with the chickens, it's generally dark, so that's just something else that I would consider as well. If you're a bit fair-weather and you don't want to don your wellies and the water proof to be making sure they've got food and water when they need it, then maybe chickens aren't for you.
So point four for me would probably be the expense of chickens. So they're not overly expensive and like with all animals there comes a level of cost involved and so the set up will be the most expensive and that routine maintenance cost. If you're buying chickens because you like the idea of fresh eggs, I can honestly say it's probably cheaper to buy fresh eggs. Chickens do require feeding. Again in my food video, subscribe, thrilled about that already, I will also go through the different costs of different types of food, but you will need to buy food regularly. You just need to consider the fact that they do need bedding, they do need feeding, they do need grit and various other things, which again I will talk about in my feeding video, plug plug plug. It is an expense and you will need to think about that as part of your research into whether or not keeping chickens is for you.
Okay so point five, it's probably a bit of a negative one but just something I wanted to draw your attention to, and that is illnesses. So there's a whole host of information on the internet about chickens and the illnesses that they get and how common that is. Unlike rabbits and guinea pigs that we've all kept as children probably and experienced the odd bit of illness here and there, chickens do quite regularly pick up different parasites and that's very common. So if you're not a nervous disposition but if you don't like getting stuck in and probably picking chickens up and probably getting covered in chicken poo and having to treat them for things like red mite, which touch wood, we haven't had yet, or poultry lice which unfortunately we have had, or scaly leg, which a couple of mine have had, which are all parasite illnesses, then again chicken keeping might not be for you. So chickens do pick up certain certain illnesses and you just need to be prepared for that. They are by nature quite dirty creatures as well so again not putting them down. love having chickens but this time of year the bottom of the run does tend to get quite squelchy and muddy. I use wood chippings, again video on that coming soon, but I use wood chippings in the bottom of ours which does need topping up probably every few months really and then digging out a couple of times a year and completely replacing. So that would be my other thing, just be prepared for the fact that once you've got chickens it's not really just, I mean you probably could but it wouldn't be recommended of just sort of plonking them outside and chucking food them every now and then and hoping you'll get lots of eggs in return. There is a level of return on investment if you like and time that you need to put into your chickens to make sure that they're happy and healthy and therefore lay happy healthy eggs.