Raising Backyard Chickens // Beginners Guide

Hey guys, in this video I'm going to go through step by step everything you need to know to raise chickens in your back yard for eggs. I'm going to cut out all the fluff and give you just the bare minimum of what you need to know to do this successfully. So by the end of this video you'll know that it's more affordable and easier than you ever thought. Maybe you've already made the decision to get them and you're wondering how to care for them or you're on the edge and looking for an excuse to be pushed or nudged in the direction of actually getting them. Either way I'm going to hold your hand and give you some really easy information to take care of these from the moment you get them all the way through their life. So let's start with how you get your chicken. Now there's a few ways to get them. The first way if we're talking life cycle would be to get the eggs and hatch them yourself. I've never done that. I don't really recommend that a beginner do that. There's just a lot more involved, a lot more equipment, time, energy and knowledge. So I'm not even going to cover that part because most people don't do that and if they do they're already taking care of chickens in their life and they know how to do all of it. So the second way is to get day-old chicks and you can get those in the mail believe it or not or a lot of farm supply or feed stores have them at this time of year usually February through June. Some of them have them year round. Now the chickens are sexed meaning they try to give you all hens because that's what most people are after and eliminate the roosters. Now there is a one in ten chance that you will get a rooster. If you've been watching me you know we got one. Ended up getting rid of him for many reasons. Roosters typically are not allowed by cities, city ordinance and or homeowners association. Hens usually are. You want to check with your city or county just to make sure. A lot of people can have five hens and that's it. But check with your city to find that out. And this might be a good time to address a common question. Do you need a rooster to get eggs? No you don't. You only need a rooster to have those eggs turn into more chickens. So with day old chicks you will be waiting about six months before you get your first fresh egg. If you're a little more anxious than that then you can get ready to lay pullets. These are about 20 weeks old so they're right at the point where they're going to start laying pretty soon. These cost a little bit more than day old chicks but you shave off five or six months of waiting time. They can go straight into the coop. There's no question that they're all female and these two can be ordered typically from a feed store or farm store or go directly to an online hatchery. Now the hardest to come by are fully grown already laying hens. If you have a friend maybe who's trying to get rid of part of their flock. Once you get into older hens it depends how old they are. If they're over three four years old their egg production is going to be a little bit less than a brand new hen that's you know first starting to lay. So let's start where most people start and that is baby chicks. They're so cute yes but they definitely don't stay that way for long. These chicks are three weeks old and they're already losing the baby fluff and growing feathers. These are copper morans. Now we have 14 chickens up in the coop already. We got two more because we have almost every color of egg imaginable but we were missing the super dark chocolate brown egg and that's what these two are going to give us. For the sake of keeping this video short and concise I'm going to do another video later in the week talking about the different breeds of chickens and which one might be the best for you. So make sure you're subscribed and have the notification bell clicked. Also let me know in the comments if you would like more content like this chicken raising videos. But for this video I'm going to move on to once you've brought your baby chicks home what you need for them to get them off to a great start. The first thing you need is a brooder. Now you can buy an expensive brooder or you can find a cardboard box. You also need a heat source that will keep the chick's environment at 95 degrees Fahrenheit 24 hours a day seven days a week. Now again you can buy some expensive heat sources. I'm just using a basic heat lamp hung over the box. Now you start the chicks out at 95 degrees for the first two weeks and then you lower the temperature by five degrees each week until they are six weeks old. And you can do that by using a thermometer inside and then raising the light a little bit higher each week until you have that temperature. Or an easier way is to get a long box. This one's about three feet long. You could go even longer like a wardrobe moving box or a refrigerator box even especially for a lot of chicks. And you can let them regulate the heat themselves. They will move further away from the light source or the heat source as needed. Now this is going to take some time to adjust. You want to watch them for the first few hours and if you see they're all huddled underneath the light then that means it's probably not low enough. It needs to be warmer so lower it down a little bit. Or if they're all against the edge of the box as far away from the light as possible you might need to raise it a bit because they're too hot. Now this heat lamp here is about two feet off of the bottom and you want to have a box that's at least two feet tall because surprisingly they can start to jump out fairly soon especially if they jump like on top of their water dispenser and then hop out. So they're about three weeks old now and they haven't jumped out yet but I'm expecting it any day. And at that point I will put some kind of top on here whether it's some galvanized hardware cloth or I've even used an old oven rack or refrigerator rack that's just wire. You don't want something that's going to keep heat trapped in here so nothing solid just something that will keep them from jumping out. The bottom of the box should be covered with a good two inches of pine shavings. Not cedar shavings. Cedar can actually be dangerous for them and not newspaper like shredded newspaper. That's very slick. It doesn't let them get used to walking correctly and it's not as absorbent as you want. Depending on the number of chicks you have you'll need to change out that bedding every week or two. Okay so we have a box, a heat source, and pine shavings. The only other two things they need at this time are food and water. For food they need starter food. It's called starter food because they're starting out and you can either get medicated or non-medicated. I've never used the medicated. I like to go as natural as possible and I've never had a problem. I got an inexpensive feeder like this one that just goes on you just put a mason jar in there fill it up with food then it dispenses. They also have longer ones for if you have more chicks but you know a lot of chicks can get around this when they need to. This is a basic water dispenser. Very inexpensive and it's best if you can hang these from a lid or from a wire or something you have across here and that way they won't pick all of the wood shavings in there. If they do you're going to be removing that several times a day or raise it up on a brick or something so it's at that height. Just always keep fresh water. Keep that thing full so they can always have access to water. I use a probiotic mix in the water for the first month. It just gets them off to a better start and really helps them thrive. Now I will have a list down below. I'll have links to all of these things but you can also find them at your local feed store or farm store. I'm also going to list all of these requirements down below so you have a checklist. So that's all they need. So what do we have so far? We have a box, a light or heat source, we have pine shavings, a feeder with food and water and a dispenser and maybe some probiotics. Now you just watch them grow and I do recommend taking them out every day or so and holding them. It's optional but it does get them used to you so they might be a little more friendly when they're adults. Now like I said these are three weeks old and you can see there's still a lot of fluff on them. The wings have a good amount of feathers right now but at six weeks old they're going to be pretty much fully feathered and at that point they're not going to have the need for the heat lamp any longer. You probably unless you live in a really warm climate you should have them indoors because even if they have the heat lamp the being indoors regulates the temperature so there's not even extremes even with that but after six to eight weeks the lamp can go away and you can start to think about putting them out in the coop. Once they're fully feathered they can regulate their own heat and even you know full-grown chickens even cold climate cold winter climate they can be in the coop and they can be just fine without any additional heat source. Added heat source in a chicken coop is more of a fire hazard than a help. So we're up to six to eight weeks of life when it's time to put them into the coop and so far pretty hands-off. I would say this is way easier than taking care of a new puppy. So let's go over coop requirements. What kind of housing do fully grown chickens need? Well I'll tell you one thing they don't need anything as elaborate as what we're building back here. This is not only just a hen house it's also a potting shed and it was just a really good excuse to build a cottage behind my up-and-coming cottage garden. You don't have to have anything near this elaborate. At our last house it was still elaborate but it was really a recycled playset of Noah's and we used the wood from the playset and an old shed that we had torn down and so it was built with very little money whatsoever. I've had chickens since I was a kid and when I was a kid we had something very basic. We had an old rabbit hutch that we converted into the hen house and then to give them space to run around outside we just chicken wired in an area. Now a lot of people don't even have that they just let their chickens out all day in free range and bring them into the coop at night or chickens will put themselves away and then you just have to close it up or they have automatic doors that open at sunrise and close at sunset. But you do have to know that there will be some predator issues you know depending on where you live you will have some chickens picked off that way. The most important thing to consider is the space that the chickens have inside whatever structure you're building or buying for them. A good rule of thumb is about three square feet of floor space inside the hen house or the coop per chicken and about eight to ten square feet per chicken in the outdoor run. Now that being said the more space you can give them the happier they'll be and the less picking on each other you will get. So as far as setup no matter how elaborate you want to get be it an English cottage or I actually saw a UFO one online one time they all need the basic things. Let's start with the run first. In my opinion if you can make it tall enough to stand up in or at least stoop a little bit it makes it easier to get in there and do whatever you need to do being cleaning it out or just hanging out. In my last chicken coop I literally had to do a duck squat or whatever you call that to get in there and do anything so it was not conducive to a happy chicken keeper. It needs to have a dirt floor you can see they love taking dust baths and digging holes look at this hole they dug and they get in there and they just kind of lay down and take it easy. In addition chickens use the grit from the ground little tiny stones and things to help digest their food and so if you don't have them on a dirt surface where they can get access to that then you need to add some grit to their food just a handful whenever you feed them and it's also great to give them things to climb on. I've seen people make swings put you know tree branches in there we have this huge stump that was right there and I got to use that as a great excuse to not have to go to the expense and trouble of taking it out. So let's talk about the hen house itself it's actually just this portion from one end of the chimney to the end of the building that's the hen part of this whole structure. All right so here we are inside the hen house and again if you can make it where you can stand up inside or reach in from the outside it might be a hen house that's raised up off the ground like when you purchase or something but if you need to get inside to clean up best if you can stand up. Now if you live in a place with cold winters you want to make sure that you have a way to close off the windows or any ventilation it will need ventilation in the summertime and throughout the year except for the winter when it's cold but you don't want drafts but you do want to be able to open it up for drafts in the summer because it can get a little stinky if you don't have that. If it's raised up off the ground or on the ground the floor needs to be solid so if it's raised up you'd want like a wooden floor with wood shavings or if you're on the ground right here there's dirt under here what you don't want is a wire bottom that is not good for their feet. Now about the bottom because if especially if you have a wooden floor you don't want them to be pooping just on that wood floor all the time it would get messy really quickly so you want to have pine shavings down. Now I do the deep litter method I think that is the easiest way most efficient way basically when you start out you put about five or six inches of wood shavings on the ground and then over the course of time they will break that down by you know kicking it around but the poop is heavier than those shavings and so it kind of gets buried down in the shavings and every once in a while when it's looking bad you can throw another layer of pine shavings right on top of that and just keep building it up and maybe once a year then you take all of it out put it in your compost and I know it sounds weird to leave chicken poop in here for a year but it really doesn't smell at all once it's dried it's just almost like compost. So this is the area where they can come in from inclement weather but it's also where they sleep. Now I've hung this piece of weed cloth here because this bright window is right across from that and I just wanted to give them some darkness and some privacy for their sleeping quarters but if we look under here you'll basically just see a bunch of these are actually two by threes. I've heard that you should put round posts I've never done that and they've done just fine on these so whatever you happen to have the bottom line is that they're up off the ground that is what they would naturally do in the wild get up off the ground and away from predators so that's they like to sleep. Now for the other thing that chickens use the hen house for and that is the most important part laying the eggs. So this is where the nest boxes are and we have a chicken in here busy at work right now. Now how many nest boxes do you need and how big should they be? Well you can see right here it's just a little bit bigger than the chicken itself they like a nice cozy spot to lay their eggs and not have somebody watching them sorry and you really could use anything I built these as I was building this structure but you can have milk crates with one side cut out you can make wooden boxes they need to have a little lip on the front because you want some bedding in there some straw or some pine shavings to give them a nice comfortable place but also to cushion that egg when it falls out and then you'll need to take that bedding out if it gets you know messed up. Some chickens poop in there I've never really had that issue I had the rooster pooping in there that's one of the reasons he's gone but my chickens don't really poop in their nest boxes I know some do and so when I used to put bedding in there I wouldn't have to change it very often in fact it would get kicked out and I would have to add more to it. Now when I built this structure here I built these egg boxes in a way well let me show you if you notice in these boxes and I'll focus on the one that's not occupied at the moment they are slanted so when the egg is laid it rolls down and into this egg box so this keeps the eggs clean and not broken and so far it's working. Now I had seen this in another chicken coop and so I replicated it you can also buy something like this it's like a nest box that does the same thing that you hang on the coop it was kind of expensive and this I virtually did with the scrap wood as I was building this whole thing. You'll notice I don't have pine shavings or straw in here because that doesn't allow for the rolling of the eggs this is just some artificial turf that I put in upside down I screwed on I tried it right side up with the green showing but it just the length of it did not allow the eggs to roll so this just gives them a little padding something to scratch around on but it still allows the eggs to exit the actual nest box. So how many nest boxes do you need? Well at my last house I had five chickens and we had two nest boxes and they always used just one they would wait their turn and just use the one and the other one just always remained empty. So here I have 14 chickens it'll be 16 with the two new ones that we have in the house right now. Right now we've got two of the boxes open and they do use both of them but there's never uh you know there's never a line waiting for them to get in so in the future I may have to open one of these other two we'll see but you certainly don't need one nest box per chicken. So how many eggs do you get from your chickens and it kind of depends on the breed and we've got a lot of different breeds here these eggs haven't been collected in about a day and a half so there's 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 eggs and from our 14 hens we typically get about a dozen eggs a day but these these hens are all about a year old except for three that we brought from our other house one rarely lays she's about six years old five years old maybe so some do lay reliably every single day some skip a day here and there in the winter time when the light levels are lower you will get maybe even a stop to your egg production they do not lay as well in the winter when there's not as much light. Now some people hang artificial lighting in their coops to keep their chickens laying but for me I feel like if they're naturally supposed to have a break then we should give them a break. So that's the basic hen house setup so all you've got is a solid floor mind your spacing per chicken you've got a place for them to sleep and a place for them to lay their eggs. Not getting very hard is it? So now that we've talked shelter let's talk food and water. As far as water is concerned in our last house we had a Home Depot bucket with chicken nipples screwed into the bottom and that makes it easy for them to just go up kind of raise up and get drink out of the it's kind of like a little rabbit feeders they kind of lick the thing hanging there and it lets water out and those are great because you don't have to refill them very often. In here I've got this waterer so you fill this entire thing up with water and it dispenses it down at the bottom so I don't know I may have to fill that once a week be a little bit more in the summertime and then for food I just have these rubber bowls from the farm supply store and then I give them food in that I keep the food right out here in this trash can. So what kind of food do you give them and how much? So we already talked about starter food when they're you know babies and that is those that food has a lot of protein in it because they're growing so fast they need that protein and they're going to eat that for the first eight weeks of their life and then you're going to switch them to grower feed contains a little less protein and they will stay on that until they're about 18 weeks old and just for both of these stages just always have it available so that they can eat when they want to and then after 18 weeks we're getting to the point now where they're going to their body's going to start changing and becoming ready to lay eggs and so you want to put them on a layer feed and that's gonna that's what they're going to stay on from now on. Now you want to feed adult chickens about a quarter pound of food per chicken per day so you can do the math on that depending on how many chickens you have and you can feed them feed it to them daily in those bowls and just put it in there in the morning. Now the quarter pound doesn't have to be just that food they should get a good amount of that food because it's got everything they need in it the different proteins and things that they need where they might not get that unless they're free ranging and can get access to bugs and things like that. Chickens are omnivores they're not vegetarian and there's some snacks you can give them like mealworm snacks. I'm sticking to the necessities and those are not a necessity as long as you've got food with protein in it but part of that quarter pound of food per day per chicken can be kitchen scraps and if there's meat in that kitchen scrap all the better that's protein right they don't even need if I bring out a bunch of scraps with meat and they can't eat chicken which I thought was weird at first but then birds eat birds in the wild all the time right but I we had some leftover ham from Christmas I brought that entire leftover ham bone and all out here and with just a couple of hours of eating on it it was down to the bones it looked like I'd left it in a tank full of piranhas. So if you can bring the meat and whatever kitchen scraps chickens can eat almost anything that humans can eat there's actually a very short list of things that they shouldn't eat I will put that down in the description because that list is way shorter than the list of things they can eat but kitchen scraps garden scraps like I said when you're weeding or pulling out lettuce that's bolted or whatever throw it all in the run and it'll be gone by the end of the day so that count as part of their quarter pound allotment for the day. Now I will tell you that the more greens they eat the the darker the deeper color the yolk so if they don't eat much greens at all it's going to be a pale yellow yolk. If they get a lot of greens in their diet they're going to take all that goodness from the chlorophyll and the sun and transfer it into a really bright orange yolk. So I showed you the bowls that I feed them in you can also have a dispenser I did one of these at my last house and we may be going on vacation and so I might be doing it again because I'm not going to be here every day my dad will be watching the house and I don't want him to have to deal with it every day and so the feeder that I had now I granted I only had five chickens at the time uh and I think I did a tour of that old coop I'll put up some video here so you can see what that was like it was just made out of pvc and a flower pot and I basically could fill that entire thing with food and that would last for five chickens for two to three weeks I wouldn't have to change their food and with five chickens that home depot bucket of water I wouldn't have to change that or add to that but every three to four weeks as well so we're talking about a hands-off thing here where basically your main job is to pick up the eggs the only thing with a dispenser like that is sometimes chickens can overeat like people and that can lead to health problems and it can slow down egg production so just keep that in mind so for here I do enjoy going out and feeding them every day gets me to interact with them but in times where I can't it is nice to have one of those dispensers and I'll probably do a video on this channel making one of those dispensers before we do leave for our trip and I didn't mention so I think I'll throw it in here when you're collecting the eggs when they are laying eggs you should try to collect them daily there is no problem with them sitting as long as it's not super hot and they're out there for days they're completely fine we leave our eggs on the counter we do not refrigerate them we go through them fairly quickly once you wash an egg though it does need to be put in the refrigerator because they have a what's called bloom on that egg that protects it from the outside world and as soon as you wash that off it's no longer protected so if you don't wash your eggs they can sit in a basket on the counter for quite a while weeks but if you do wash those eggs they need to go in the fridge immediately but collect them every day it keeps them from getting dirty and broken inside the coop all right if this video did what my goal was was to lay out the bare necessities of what you need to keep it super simple and easy um let me know if I did that I really hope I did let me know if this video changed your mind one way or the other if you were planning on it and now you don't want to or if you were on the fence and maybe I showed you it wasn't as big a deal as you thought I'm amazed at how quickly people will go out and get a dog because it's so cute and a dog is so much more responsibility and for much longer of a time than chickens chickens are so self-sufficient and they give back so much from the compost to the eggs to just the fun of watching them run around I do think it's well worth it for you to consider it if you learned something from this video please give it a thumbs up share it with a friend who maybe has been talking about getting chickens do it together make sure you're subscribed and hit the bell if you would like more chicken content let me know that and I'll see you guys next time