Home fresh eggs: How to raise chickens in your backyard

Life cycle
Many chicken breeds live around eight to 12 years. The easiest way to raise your own chicks is to buy day-olds that have been "sexed," or identified as female. (Even municipalities that allow chickens usually ban roosters.) Day-olds will need round-the-clock heat of about 32 degrees Celsius, with the temperature slowly reduced each week as they grow.

Once they hit four to six months of age, hens will be ready to start laying eggs. They can lay for a few years – or over a decade, depending on their breed and living conditions.

Breeds
When Googling local hatcheries or feed stores (which sell chicks individually, unlike many hatcheries, which may only sell in lots of 10 or 20), look for egg-laying or "dual-purpose" breeds. Read the personality traits associated with each breed, too. Sussex, for instance, are friendly. Wyandottes can be aloof. Leghorns sometimes avoid human contact – or attack.

The Chicken Selector Tool at mypetchicken.com can help you find your match.

Housing
Day-old chicks will quickly outgrow their starter cage and need to be moved to a coop with a minimum space of three or four square feet per bird from approximately one month on. As they grow, give them supervised "free-range" time in the yard or house to avoid confinement stress, which can lead to aggression and even cannibalism. Frequent handling helps tame them, too.

By week five, Twyla, Rose and Buttercup were in their "outdoor" coop. Our coop is a four-by-seven-foot pine-framed enclosure encased in wire mesh, with a plywood floor. My husband built it into our large potting shed. The coop is raised three feet off the floor to minimize cold, wet drafts. My husband cut an opening through the exterior wall, so the chickens can walk a wooden plank into their sand-covered, two-by-10-foot fenced outdoor run. Playground sand makes a good run surface because it dries fast (as does the hen poo that lands on it), unlike a dirt floor, which can get muddy and quite filthy over time.

Check out the wonderful website www.backyardchickens.com  for beautiful and practical coop designs.

TIP: For those less DIY-inclined, there's an awesome product on the market called Eglu, which combines a coop and run in one moveable, super-stylish, modular unit built for two hens. It's a UK product that's shipped from its US partner Omlet.

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