Bought a house - previous owner moved to a town home so we kept the chickens. There is a decent amount of space on the property, and half of it is a forested hillside.
Any suggestions for a newbie? A new coop is definitely first thing on my list. And a fence around the property.
One of the chickens is an outcast and I feel bad for her, doesn’t leave the coop when the others go out in the yard and doesn’t eat treats from the ground just food from the feeder. The other chickens get along well it seems.
A scoop of mash, a scoop of scratch, and a handful crushed oyster shell every morning.
I’ve heard of the oyster shell, do they really need that much?
At the moment we have a back of pellets that the previous owner left. I’ll look into getting the mash and scratch. Are they supplementary to the pellets or an alternative?
Also got some black soldier fly larvae as I noticed an empty bag of them laying around. They seemed to really like those.
I fed my chicken their own well crushed egg shells.
I had an overly complicated process of first microwaving the eggshells so they’d be super dry and crispy, then whizzing them in an old blender dedicated to the job of grinding eggshells. Hens liked it rougher, but the ducks demanded shells ground to powder so they could do the ducky thing of scooping up a bunch, dipping it in water, and then muddling it into a milky sauce that they splattered all over. Ducks are sooo messy compared to chickens.
I prefer to add eggshells to my compost so my plants get calcium since eggshells are easy to pulverize with a atick or muddle and supplement calcium for the chickens with calcium carbonate or baked oyster/clamshells. The clamshells are a lot harder to break, you have to bake them well to get them as brittle as oystershells but it’s cheaper.
Oyster shell is for calcium. Their eggs shells will get thin and weak without it. Yes, they LOVE dried grubs, but that gets expensive. If the flock is roosting in the trees, some grubs will usually bring them down immediately.
Make sure that you leave a small pile of pea gravel somewhere. They’ll fill their gizzard with it to help digest things.
They don’t need a ton, but if they don’t get ithe oyster shell the eggs become increasingly fragile until they break when laid. Letting them free range gives them good bugs and nutrients. They lay less on the winter. You may want to consider something to heat the coop a bit in the winter depending on where you live. We tossed out a lot of table scraps since they eat anything, even chicken and egg shells.
I’ve never given my chickens oysters, hadn’t even heard of it to this. Their feed has everything they need, and mine roam and eat what they want. If I use eggs when cooking I crack the egg into whatever vessel I’m using, then shoot the shell in the sink. Then I rise them, crush them with my hand into what would be a compost bin… And instead give it to the chickens. My chickens like everything, I can break a branch off and they’ll eat all the leaves off it.
If you want busy projects, you can put down layer cover on parts of the yard like clover seeds down before it rains. And they’ll enjoy eating it, and it can look nice