Our chiks are due on tuesday so thought i would come and introduce myself!!

[morethanyoubargainfor]

We are entering into the world of chicken keepers .

My friend has chickens that went broody so they got her some eggs to sit on and they are due on Tuesday. I have a house being delievered next week and we are all so excited about it.

I hope it works, the surrogate mother hen appears to be doing a great job.

i am nervous about rodents as i am terrified, and i mean terrified, of mice (have had CBT for my phobia in past, i might re start again). Please reassure me that it will all be ok.

so anyway here i am, morethanyoubargainfor, the hopeful owner of some chicks (if they hatch and are the girls!)

Oh my goodness you need to do some research quickly.

You will not be needing a chicken house for a while yet, not until they are fully fledged ie have their adult feathers. They'll need to stay with the mum until then or else you'll need a warm, safe place for them to live with a heat lamp.

Chickens and rats/mice go together, it's unavoidable but you'll probably never see them. Hygiene is important, that is, not leaving scraps or grain lying about but with chickens that is not often possible, especially if you feed them from a feed hopper.

You'll also need to clean them out regularly which means you'll need a compost area if you can't bin it. Compost sites make happy homes for rodents, but again you'll probably never see them, so I wouldn't worry about them if I were you.

Please ensure your hens have a fox/badgerproof home. Recently a badger killed mine by ripping through the shiplap of my wooden henhouse. Same thing happened to my friend's chickens, although it could have been a fox in her case.

we are researching, honest!

how can you make sure that a coop is badger/fox proof? Cleaning out isn't a problem, or is disposal of waste. I plan on picking up feeder every night so hopefully that will help.

You seemed rather shocked that we are entering into chicken keeping, can i ask why, is it just the rodent issue?

I think we are very prepared for the arrivals, and we know we won't have them for a while but have our house so we can train the dogs not to go near it.

There are some great books on chicken keeping basics which would be worth getting. How old will the chicks be when you get them? If possible it is best for them to stay with the hen until they are around 5/6 weeks old (depending on the breed and as jowf says when they have some adult feathers) if you are getting them any younger than this then as a minimum you need a heat lamp, somewhere inside (your house if they are really young a secure shed if not but still less than 5 weeks) We have a large deep seed tray- 4ft square - , a wooden structure to go around it - 3 ft high - and a net on top (they learn to fly really quickly) that we suspend the heat lamp above. they have a food bowl and water feeder (not bowl of water as they can drown) then gradually over the weeks we move the lamp up, turn it off during the day, turn it off day and night then move them to an outdoor shed and eventually at 5/6 weeks to an arc outside. They shouldnt be in a coop until at least 5/6 weeks old so you have plenty of time to fox proof it. Ours is a triangular ark with chicken wire on the bottom (to stop anything burrowing in). Hope all of this helps and good luck.

I like to see my chucks and ducks as free range as much as possible so I've secured their compound and paddock with 4ft high electric fencing (mains) which is as fox/badger proof as it gets.

I lost some ducklings when I had them in an arc a few years ago. The badger almost turned it upside down and had gnawed through the wood. I hadn't realised how destructive badgers were until that happened. I found arcs hard work and pokey, also not easy to move around or clean and then when the grass grows they can 'knit' into the ground. The heavy ones on wheels are better as chickens soil the ground quickly so they can be moved daily.

Luckily my dog has been trained to be good with them all, quite important if they ever escape!

thanks, we won't be getting them until about six weeks+ we will get to see them everyday though .

we are hoping to have a fully wired run and the coop is raised above the ground. We won't have the bottom of run wired, but we have a very very secure garden with very very deep concrete plinths on the bottom of our fencing. I am not niave but i think anything that wants to get in will have to work very hard and be very determined. Hope that will be ok, the chickens will be securely locked away from dusk to dawn.

Then welcome to the very happy world of hen keeping! Mine all have names and are friendly, dc can cuddle them and collect the eggs. They make excellent pets. We have experimented with many egg recipes including making our own pasta and the different breeds lay different colour eggs.

OMG I'm so desperate to get 2 chickens...........
do they HAVE to have grass???? or an eglu with a bit of a run and some kind of flooring be sufficient?