To keep our chickens laying all winter long, we do something that many other homesteaders don’t. I’m talking about keeping lights on in a chicken coop over winter. A chicken needs a certain number of daylight hours to lay, and during the winter, they don’t get that. It’s a common question among chicken new chicken… [read more]
Homemade Chicken Feed-Feed Your Chickens Cheaply
Happy chickens make great eggs! Here’s a recipe to make your own feed for smaller flocks, or supplemental scratch for larger flocks. When you have laying chickens, they will need to be fed. The best feed for chickens, of course, is their natural diet of bugs, grass, and worms. Even free range chickens that get to run,… [read more]
Converting a Dog House into a Chicken Coop
Converting a Dog House into a Chicken Coop Here are our sweet Silkie chickens. My daughter has these babies as “show chickens” for 4H. Aren’t they adorable? We had them separate from the other hens since they were show birds, and their coop was just an open box. It did the trick, but we wanted… [read more]
How To Raise Chickens For Meat On The Homestead
Raising chickens for meat, either as broilers or roaster chickens is one way to be assured of the quality of chicken you are feeding your family. Let me show you some tips from what we learned on how to raise chickens for meat. Our family raises 150 meat birds each year, and we will can… [read more]
Moving the Compost Bin into the Chicken Area
We decided to move our compost bin from our garden to our chicken area recently. Before everyone starts giving me all the reasons why it’s not a good idea, let me tell you why we did it. Our chickens are free range. That means they have full control of a fenced in area. Sometimes that… [read more]
How To Get Ready for Chicks
Spring is on the way, and with it, new life on the homesteads. There are a lot of homesteaders that can and will hatch their own chicks, either by incubator or broody hen, and there are those of us without roosters that will be ordering more chicks. Either way you choose to add to your… [read more]
Caring for Your Chickens in the Winter
Chickens are a rather low maintenance animal, in my opinion. Caring for your chickens in the winter doesn’t require much effort, just a little foresight. Chickens need water in the winter. You will want to keep it from freezing as much as possible. My affiliate partner, Amazon, sells these really cool heated waterers that work… [read more]
What is a Chicken Tractor?
What is a chicken tractor? Basically, it’s a coop that you can move around fairly easily in your yard. The benefits of this are that the chickens will get the bugs and grass from an area and fertilize it. Also, it will also be able to provide better protection from predators. Here is our first… [read more]
How to Grow Fodder to Feed Chickens, Ducks and Rabbits
Growing fodder is a cheap way to feed your chickens, ducks, and rabbits throughout the year. It’s a simple concept, really. Basically, it’s allowing grains to sprout and grow into their respective grasses for feed supplementation for poultry. The animals then get greens with chlorophyll, as well as the proteins from the grains and the… [read more]
5 Reasons to Keep Chickens and 4 Reasons Not To
We love our girls, we really do! If you are considering adding some chickens to your backyard homestead, here are my top 5 reasons to do so. Of course, with 5 reasons to keep chickens, we have to add “and 4 reasons NOT to”. Bug and Pest Control Chickens are great for bug control. They… [read more]