Becoming a Chicken Tender – Chicken 101 For Beginners, from a Beginner

Hello there! Thinking about getting some backyard chickens? You’ve come to the right place. Here, you will find some beginner knowledge on becoming an official chicken tender (funny right?) and I will include some helpful links that really helped us along the way.

Let’s start with the actual chickens. The first thing I did was research. This is very important because there are a lot of factors to consider when selecting what breed of chicken you want for your flock. Some breeds have better temperaments which make them better if you have small kids. Chickens also lay an array of colored eggs, so you might want to start brainstorming what you want your basket of eggs to look like. You also need to consider where you live, and if the breeds you are looking at tolerate heat or cold well. This article written by Deanna on the blog Homestead & Chill was a great resource that I used when determining what breed of chicken we wanted for our flock.

Next step, LOOK UP YOUR ORDINANCES. You need to make sure you can legally have chickens, especially if you live in the city. You don’t want to become attached to cute little baby chicks and dump a bunch of money into supplies and a coop build.

Now it’s time for YOU to learn from a mistake that WE made. BUILD YOUR COOP BEFORE YOU GET YOUR CHICKENS! Ya’ll, we had chickens walking through our living room because they were way too big for the brooder and way too curious, and the coop took us way longer to build than we thought it would. And you know, chickens grow really fast! Like you blink and they double in size. It’s crazy.

Now it’s time to think about what kind of coop you want to build. We knew that we wanted to move ours around the yard. The bottom of our coop is actually mesh wire so their poop falls through the floor while they’re sleeping. Then every time we get the mower out to mow, we just move the coop. We initially weren’t going to build ours this big, it just kind of evolved. We were trying to use wood we had leftover from other projects and old siding from our garage. There are also lots of great coops out there you can buy and assemble if you don’t want to piece one together like we did. One of my favorite follows is Justin Rhodes and his Chicksaw plans. He also made a miniature version that would be PERFECT for a small flock. His plans are free and some of our coop that we built encompassed some of his ideas from his coop. Why we went with a mobile coop: Less smell, chickens less likely to get sick, doesn’t destroy yard but actually fertilizes and tills, and you don’t have to clean the coop!

Last, but not least, bringing your chicks home. It’s actually pretty simple, you just need a tub, a heat source, food and water. Yep, that’s basically it. Oh, and some bedding. Places like Tractor Supply or your local farm store actually sell kits (what we bought) that have everything you need. We just used an old storage tote and bought a bunch of bedding.

Oh, and one more thing! TIMING! You really want to get baby chicks in the spring, so they have the spring and summer to fully feather out so they can keep themselves warm enough in the winter. We plan on adding supplemental heat to our coop, because we have REALLY cold winters here in Kansas City. But our girls will also be full size and fully feathered by the time temperatures start to drop this fall. With that being said, that’s another positive to having the coop built before they arrive, they can spend time outside when it’s sunny and warm and back to the brooder at night. We actually built what we call a chicken condo for our small chickens. It’s predator proof (we were using a baby play yard before we build this and lost a goose and a chicken). Predator proofing is very important (use steel mesh over chicken wire!).

Thanks for stopping by. As our chicken knowledge grows, we will continue to share more!

Check back soon for more helpful articles:

BEST CHICKEN BREEDS FOR SMALL KIDS

WHY WE CHOSE TO GET A GUARD GOOSE