Which Comes First - The Chicken or The Coop

Which Comes First - The Chicken or The Coop

If you are new to raising chickens for eggs, we suggest buying or building the coop then ordering the chickens.

In the next several posts we will present ideas for manufactured coops that can be delivered to your door as well as DIY plans for various coops that you can build yourself with little building experience.

The fact of the matter is you don't need a farm to keep your own chickens, you just need a small area in your backyard to setup your coop!  Many coops will fit in an 8x8' space or less.

Building your own chicken coop will be one of the best decisions you'll make in your life. Your own backyard chicken coop will provide you with daily fresh organic eggs for the kitchen. It will recycle your families food scraps and produce high quality fertilizer for your garden.

It makes perfect economic sense to build a chicken coop yourself instead of buying an expensive pre-built chicken coops. Pre-built coops have to be assembled anyway, you're really just paying hugely inflated prices for the material.                                            
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This is one place you can start,  This publisher has simplified and documented the entire process in their guide called "Building A Chicken Coop". It covers building a coop from scratch to caring for chickens. Best of all, you can get started today. Simply download their 80+ page guide plus handful of coop plans now from the link below:.

Their guide covers everything you need to know about raising and caring for chickens so they will continue to give you the best fresh eggs:

** There Are No special tools required - Plans designed specifically for the total beginner. You won't require anything but the most simple of tools.

**Easy To Build Plans - Includes color step-by-step plans with scale diagrams and dimensions that even a child could follow.

**Save Money - On average our users save about 50% over buying their own coop. That adds up to hundreds (sometime thousands) of dollars.

**Print As Needed - My downloadable format allows you to print of as many copies as you need in case your lose or dirty a copy, or if you require multiple copies for those helping you

**Join The Local Food Movement - By creating your own "mini farm" in your backyard not only are you creating a local source of fresh food, you are helping to cut down on environmental pollution and waste caused by buying supermarket sourced eggs.

 

The link below will lead you to a one page description of coop plans offered by this company along with additional chicken raising information. There is a money back guarantee so you can't loose.  Yes I do receive a commission if you buy and keep the plans.

This is only one of several coop plans available
Click here to Consider building your own coop.

This link will lead to an unusual set of plans for a Movable Coop.  There are a lot of advantages in being able to easily relocate the coop to different locations.  

by Catawba Coops. 

    Building Chicken Coops For Dummies


More Coops - Kits and Plan Books - chicken coops

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Free Range Chickens - Going To Far

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 Free-Range Chicken Gardens: How to Create a Beautiful, Chicken-Friendly Yard

Many gardeners fear chickens will peck away at their landscape, and chicken lovers often shy away from gardening for the same reason. But you can keep chickens and have a beautiful garden, too! Fresh eggs aren't the only benefit — chickens can actually help your garden grow and thrive, even as your garden does the same for your chickens
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In this essential handbook, award-winning garden designer Jessi Bloom covers everything a gardener needs to know, including chicken-keeping basics, simple garden plans to get you started, tips on attractive fencing options, the best plants and plants to avoid, and step-by-step instructions for getting your chicken garden up and running.

For anyone who wants a fabulous garden where colorful chickens happily roam, Free-Range Chicken Gardens is the guide that will bring the dream home to roost.

Are Chickens the new "dog"?

Why Raise Chickens In Your Backyard? The Many Reasons & Benefits

Are Chickens the new "dog"?

Having a small backyard flock of chickens is a growing trend in countries around the world. And it is not just country folks who enjoy raising chickens, more and more cities are relaxing their laws and ordinances and allowing chickens, so city dwellers can enjoy this pleasant hobby too. Many celebrities such a Jennifer Aniston, Barbra Streisand, Miley Cyrus, Chevy Chase, Reese Witherspoon and Martha Steward raise backyard chickens. So why are pet chickens so popular? Let's have a look at some of the benefits of raising backyard chickens.

Chickens are easy, inexpensive pets with benefits

- Starting with and keeping chickens is relatively inexpensive. See here for a breakdown of start up and ongoing costs.
- Meat birds (Cornish Cross) are usually processed around the age of 7 – 9 weeks.  So after feeding them for only 2 months, you can stock your freezer with your own wonderful, fresh, home-grown meat.
- When you raise your own chickens, you know what went into the meat and eggs.  It’s a safer and healthier alternative to factory farmed poultry and eggs.
- The meat of farm-raised chicken has significantly less fat (and fewer calories) than typical store-bought chicken.
- Backyard and free ranged hens produce eggs that are very nutritious and great tasting. Not to mention they are always fresh! Free ranged and backyard hens' eggs are also much healthier than battery hens' eggs. Here is a comparison between the nutrient content of free range vs battery eggs:

Nutrient Content - Battery Eggs	Nutrient Content - Free Range Eggs
Vitamin A - 0.97mg	Vitamin A - 7.37mb
Vitamin E - 487IU	Vitamin E - 763IU
Beta Carotene - 10mg	Beta Carotene - 76.2mg
Folate - 47mcg	Folate - 0.71g
Omega 3 - 0.033mg	Omega 3 - 292mg
Cholesterol - 423mg	Cholesterol - 231mg
Saturated Fat - 3.1	Saturated Fat - 2.31g

- Chickens make great pets for children and great 4H projects.

- They are friendly, easy to manage, low maintenance and can be kept as house pets as well.

- Chickens are a food source. Hens will provide you with wonderful fresh eggs and cockerels (and retired hens) can be processed and eaten.

- Chickens are entertaining and keeping and spending time with your feathered friends, or just "watching chicken TV", can be rewarding and at times very funny, as this member discovered.

Free range chickens are excellent, hard working gardeners 

- Once you’ve harvested everything you want from your vegetable garden, your chickens will happily clear the beds, scratching out and eating unwanted weeds, slugs and seeds and fertilizing the soil while they're at it.
- Own an orchard or a few fruit trees? Chickens will devour the fallen fruit before it can attract insects.
- Chicken manure contains high levels of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium.
- Chicken manure is more economically valuable than synthetic fertilizers.
- Chicken manure can be used to make fertilizer tea.
- Chickens love digging and scratching around in compost heaps and composting with chickens can be very beneficial for your compost heaps too.

- Chickens will happily take care of crickets, grass hoppers, snails and other pests in the garden.

Originally posted by

http://www.backyardchickens.com/a/why-raise-chickens-in-your-backyard-the-many-reasons-benefits

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Backyard Chickens - The Newest Pet Craze

No doubt about it - Backyard Chickens for family egg production is also the Newest Pet Craze. 

They are clean, docile, beautiful pets and they pay their way by producing 200 to 250 eggs per year each. How can you beat that. 

We will continue with our coverage of dogs and cats, however, this Blog will begin covering raising chickens, chicken breeds, chicken coops, and all other subjects to help peak your interest in this growing field and then help you raise healthy productive chickens for fun and profit.

 Image from My Pet Chicken Blog