Let this be your sign to get the chickens!!!
Honestly, starting out with backyard chooks doesn’t need to be complicated or overwhelming. Strip away all the fancy homesteading and lifestyle block forums and fancy, complex setups, and the core of it is ridiculously simple: get chickens, get a coop, give them food and water, and you’re away laughing.
If you just want the quick-and-dirty breakdown to get your flock up and running, here is everything you actually need to know!
1. The Super Basic Checklist
To get started tomorrow, you literally only need four things:
- A safe coop: Somewhere dry, predator-proof, and comfortable for them to sleep and lay eggs.
- Food & fresh water: A decent layer pellet and a continuous source of fresh water.
- The chooks: Start small (or don’t! But… watch out for “chicken math” 😂).
- Nesting boxes: A dark, cozy spot inside the coop lined with straw or wood shavings where they can lay.
That’s it!!
2. Choosing Your Breeds: What Works for Us
When it comes to choosing your flock, everyone has different priorities—egg production, egg colour, or pure cuteness. Here’s what currently makes up our flock on our lifestyle block in New Zealand:
- Brown Shavers: The undisputed queens of egg production. If you want reliable, daily brown eggs, you can’t go wrong with these reliable ladies.
- Lavender Araucanas: We keep these girls for the gorgeous pastel green blue eggs! They add the best colour to the egg carton.
- The “Silkies” (Our Imposters!): We bought three “Silkies” a while back that turned out to be halfbreeds and definitely aren’t Silkies… but they stayed anyway! They lay the cutest size 6 white eggs and have so much personality.
A Note on “Chicken Math” & Herd Trimming: We used to have stunning Orpingtons, but we eventually had to sell our six cuties. Chicken math is a VERY real thing, and before I knew it, I had almost 20 chickens roaming around! Living rural, most of our neighbors already have their own flocks, so even in peak spring and summer, I couldn’t give the extra eggs away fast enough. With feed costs rising, we decided to downsize and prioritise. We kept the Araucanas over the Orpingtons because we just couldn’t part with those green eggs!
3. Feed & Scraps: Quality Over Everything
Feed isn’t cheap these days, but even with rising costs, keeping your own chooks is still cheaper than buying quality eggs at the supermarket—plus, the fresh taste doesn’t even compare.
- The Main Diet: We stick to Peck ’n’ Lay from Farmlands. It’s on the higher-end, more expensive side of feeds, but in our opinion, it’s 100% worth it. Our chickens are incredibly healthy, and the eggs and deep golden yolks we get are proof that quality feed matters.
- Kitchen Scraps: Our girls get a top-up of scraps from the kitchen! Though, since we also breed Berkshire pigs here on the property, it’s usually luck of the draw whether the chickens or the pigs win the day’s kitchen treats!
4. Chicken housing (they love to poop on your deck)
Where you house your chickens depends entirely on your space, but safety and containment are key.
- Our Setup (The Mobile Coop): We built our own chicken coop from scratch and mounted it on a sled-like base. This allows us to tow it around the paddock to fresh grass whenever we want.
- The Free-Range Deck Problem: Our chooks are mostly free-range, but we do have to lock them up in their run from time to time. Why? Because left to their own devices, they love to roost on our deck and stare into the lounge to watch us. As cute as it is to have them peeking through the glass, they shit allllllll over the deck! Having a coop setup where they’re happy, safe, and on fresh grass when locked up is a life-saver.
- If you’re in town or on a smaller block: You don’t need a mobile setup! A sturdy, fixed coop in one spot in a backyard with a secure run will work perfectly.
Ready to Take the Leap?
Don’t overthink it. Get your setup ready, pick a couple of hardy breeds, and enjoy the reward of walking out to the coop to collect your own fresh eggs every morning.
Are you thinking about getting chooks, or are you already suffering from “chicken math”? Let me know in the comments below!
