Skip to main content

Getting stared with chickens - summing up

In 2013 I interviewed chicken flocksters on different sized properties, from suburban blocks to small farms, in four different countries, about getting started with chickens. This was a continuation from my first series of interviews about “getting started with growing your own”. One thing was the same in every interview, everyone loves watching their chickens! I really enjoyed reading these interviews, so I hope you did too. It is interesting to read about how people keep their chickens (and other poultry) and why they make those decisions, with lots of great advice for new chicken keepers too.

Here are all the interviews:

Ohiofarm Girl of Adventure in the Goodland (USA)

Gavin from the Greening of Gavin (Aust)

Madeleine from NZ Eco Chick (NZ)

Tanya of Lovely Greens (UK)

Adam and Amy from Sustainaburbia (Aust)

Linda from Greenhaven (Aust)

And my interview with myself (Aust)





I'm looking forward to more chicken discussions...




By the way, my chicken eBook is now available if you want to know more about backyard chickens and using chicken tractors.  More information over at the chicken tractor ebook blog.  Or you can get it directly from my shop on Etsy (.pdf format), or Amazon Kindle or just send me an email eight.acres.liz {at} gmail.com.




What's the eBook about?
Chickens in a confined coop can end up living in an unpleasant dust-bowl, but allowing chickens to free-range can result in chickens getting into gardens and expose them to predators.

 A movable cage or “chicken tractor” is the best of both options – the chickens are safe, have access to clean grass, fresh air and bugs. Feed costs are reduced, chickens are happier, and egg production increases. 

 But how do you build a chicken tractor? What aspects should be considered in designing and using a chicken tractor effectively? In this eBook I aim to explain how to make a chicken tractor work for you in your environment to meet your goals for keeping chickens. 

I also list what I have learnt over 10 years of keeping chickens in tractors of various designs and sizes, from hatching chicks, through to butchering roosters.


Reviews of the Design and Use a Chicken Tractor


Comments

  1. Hi Liz, thanks for this series and for offering a give away of this book. My advice, after everything that has happened here on the farm the last few weeks, make sure a fox/dogs etc 100% can not get in to their pens, I thought I had mine pretty well covered, but something still found it's way in while the big dogs were away from the property...and read everything you can about them and build a practical pen, squeezing in to a small pen to catch a chicken or clean out their pen is no fun...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Loved this series!!! It was so funny and I learnt heaps. I love my chooks. At the moment they are super busy at the moment working over my garden. I love my mini tractors!!! I'm in NZ (as you know) but my brother lives in Oz and he's coming here next month. Can I please still enter? Would so LOVE this book!!!! Look forward to the next series! Mx

    ReplyDelete
  3. I think the series has been a very sensible and informative thing to do with the rising popularity of keeping backyard chooks. My one BIG bug bare is....be prepared to kill your chooks. Invariably there will be illness like a cloaca prolapse or an attack by other animal and the kindest thing is euthanasia. Same goes for roosters....don't dump them....it's kinder to kill them (and makes sense). Tomorrow night at our Living Better meet-up we are really talking poultry in a big way and we have a speaker to talk to us about coccidiosis. Looking forward to it.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Yes, I too liked it. My advice would be to start small. And keep them away from your food gardens, 'cause they will ruin a seasons food within hours...That does look like an informative read, thanks for the chance to win it.

    Barb.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Cheers Liz, we are waiting until we move on to our farm to get into chookopia.

    ReplyDelete
  6. I too liked your series. My advice would be to make sure you have suitable secure housing for your chickens BEFORE you purchase them. Its a real pain when livestock comes home and you haven't planned properly for them.
    Lynda

    ReplyDelete
  7. Hi Liz, I enjoyed reading the interviews, maybe a series on keeping a house cow next??
    My advice to anyone thinking of keeping chickens is; prepare to become involved in the drama of their lives (better than Home and Away). For example; When your alpha hen goes clucky and decides to sit for a month on avocado seeds, the fights and strange behaviors exhibited by the beta hens trying to become alpha hen will amuse and bemuse you.
    Jude from Australia. (Chronicles of a humpy dweller)

    ReplyDelete
  8. This was a great series. Thank you for posting at the HomeAcre Hop; I hope you'll join us again this Thursday.

    ReplyDelete
  9. My advice is to go for it!!! Chickens are wonderful, easy pets that give back!!
    To have eggs all year around make sure you have a hen that matures (turns 6 months old & begins to lay) in May or June. The first year they come to maturity they must lay & so you will get your winter eggs whilst the old girls get lazy about giving them :)
    Blessings
    Renata:)

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Thanks, I appreciate all your comments, suggestions and questions, but I don't always get time to reply right away. If you need me to reply personally to a question, please leave your email address in the comment or in your profile, or email me directly on eight.acres.liz at gmail.com

Popular posts from this blog

The new Eight Acres website is live!

Very soon this blogspot address will automatically redirect to the new Eight Acres site, but in the meantime, you can check it out here .  You will find all my soaps, ebooks and beeswax/honey products there, as well as the blog (needs a tidy up, but its all there!).  I will be gradually updating all my social media links and updating and sharing blog posts over the next few months.  I'm very excited to share this new website with you!

Chicken tractor guest post

Sign up for my weekly email updates here , you will find out more about chickens, soap and our farmlife, straight to your inbox, never miss a post!  New soap website and shop opening soon.... Tanya from Lovely Greens invited me to write a guest post on chicken tractors for her blog.  I can't believe how many page views I get for chicken tractors, they seem to be a real area of interest and I hope that the information on my blog has helped people.  I find that when I use something everyday, I forget the details that other people may not be aware of, so in this post for Tanya, I tried to just write everything I could think of that I haven't covered in previous posts.  I tried to explain everything we do and why, so that people in other locations and situations can figure out how best to use chicken tractors with their own chickens. The dogs like to hang out behind the chicken tractors and eat chicken poo.  Dogs are gross! If you want to read more about chicken tractor

How to make soap with beer (and tallow)

I may  have mentioned this before.... soap making is addictive!  Once you start, you just want to keep making more soap.  And not the same soap, you want to try all sorts of different soaps.  I made the mistake of joining a facebook group called Saponification Nation  and now my facebook newsfeed is full of glorious soaps, in all colours and shapes, which makes it even harder to resist the urge to experiment.  One soap that kept popping up a few weeks ago was soap made with beer. I generally prefer not to use ingredients just for the sake of it, I like to know that they are adding something to the properties of the finished soap.   As you know, I don't like to use artificial ingredients either (colours or fragrances).   When I read about beer in soap I found out that beer adds sugar to the mixture, which increases lather.  I use tallow in my soap, which has limited lather, so anything that adds lather could improve the soap.  It also contributes a tan or brown colour to