As a chicken flock keeper, you’re concerned about the well-being, safety, and health of your flock. Although you can’t control everything, such as predators, pests, diseases, and injuries, you can take a proactive role to ensure your chickens thrive in your backyard.The following can help you raise healthy chickens so they can provide you with eggs and happiness for years to come.

Chicken owners are a particularly self-reliant bunch. Chicken-keeping is meant to make you just a little more self-sufficient; why spend gobs of cash to do it? Maybe that helps explain why so many chicken folks build their own coops. To get started, you should familiarize yourself with chicken coop styles, the tools and building materials you need, and the carpentry skills to master.

Chickens are gaining popularity quickly. Not only are chickens fun and educational, but they're also beneficial to you and your garden. When you free-range your flock, you gain helpful gardeners who aerate the soil, rid plants of insects, provide composting, and, best of all, supply food — their eggs!Here's how to gain insight on good and bad plants for a chicken garden, layer your garden for free-ranging chickens, and guard against chicken predators.

Raising chickens can be fun and rewarding. Whether you’re raising birds for their eggs or for their cackling companionship, caring for your birds is an everyday project. Raising happy and healthy birds means knowing how to take care of baby chicks and what to feed them as they mature.Daily chores to keep your chickens healthyIf you’re raising chickens, whether for eggs, meat, or companionship, you want your fowl to stay healthy.

The starting point in a chick’s life is pipping, the moment that a chick breaks through the shell and begins its entrance into the world. A healthy hatchling innately knows exactly what to do, and you shouldn’t interfere with the program.The moment for you to step in is immediately after hatching, when you have a role in preventing four common problems of the newly hatched, which are chick malformations, spraddle legs, belly button infections, and pasty vents.

Sometimes your flock may come down with ailments caused by fungal infections. Fungi aren’t plants or animals; they’re a unique, primitive category of life all their own. Mushrooms, molds, and yeast are fungi. Molds and yeasts can infect and sicken backyard chickens under the right circumstances. Brooder pneumonia (aspergillosis) Aspergillus mold organisms grow in every chicken’s environment, flourishing in damp bedding and rotten coop wood.

Okay, you’ve picked out the spot. You know where in your garden you want to situate your coop and outside pen. You’ve carefully assessed the size of a chicken flock that is best for you.Chicken coops have many variations. They can be permanent, mobile, new, repurposed, custom, and innovative. Chicken coops can be cheap — as in free — using wood pallets or recycled materials.

So what is the answer to the age-old question: Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Well, here, you start with the chicken and end up with an egg. Along the way, you discover the reproductive ins and outs of chickens. When chickens reach sexual maturity Young female chickens (pullets) of modern breeds, such as commercial strains of Leghorns, start laying eggs at around 18 to 21 weeks of age and are 8 months old when they reach peak egg production.

So, what exactly do we mean by "neighbors" in this context? Neighbors are any people who are in sight, sound, and smelling distance of your chickens. Even if it’s legal in your urban or suburban area to keep chickens, the law may require your neighbors’ approval and continued tolerance. And it pays to keep your neighbors happy anyway.