Chickens are perfect for reducing the food waste around your home; they eat anything, and pretty much everything is safe for them to eat.  But is feeding them crab shells going too far? We don’t have a lot at our home, but after a home-cooked Valentine’s Day dinner, we wondered what to do with the […]

Chickens are great, but they need a flock to be happy and mentally healthy.  When some get sick or attacked, chicken keepers will sometimes find themselves with only one chicken on their mini-farm.  Is this OK? Will your fowl survive? Can you have just one chicken? I didn’t know the answer, so I researched and […]

I love spending time watching how chickens interact.  But as I was watching them, I noticed they didn’t blink their eyes.  They stayed open all the time. But then, at night, I’ve seen them closed.  Was I missing something? I needed to know the answer, so I researched the question: Do chickens blink? This article is […]

I’d never thought about milking a chicken before, but I was surprised at the number of people who asked about it.  I dismissed it out of hand at first, but then my mind started spinning.  Was it possible to get milk from a hen? If so, I needed to know how to milk a chicken.  Chickens […]

Chickens are well-known for their habit of eating anything they can fit in their gullets, but not everything is good or safe for them.  I’d often heard cereals are yummy for your fowl friends, but I only had Rice Krispies when I first looked into this.  I didn’t want my hens to have issues, so […]

One day I was spreading out the feed for my chickens, and I started to think about how people did this all before commercial chicken feed.  It’s such a staple of my hens’ diet; what would they have without it? I started to wonder: What did chickens eat before commercial feed? Before commercial feed, chickens free […]

Whenever people hear that my family keeps chickens at our home, they always ask me a bunch of questions (which I love!).  Most of these I expect, but some are questions I’d never expect. And that’s OK because these are great questions.  Here’s one: How many eggs are in a chicken at one time?  Chickens don’t […]

I love keeping chickens in my backyard, and I’m not afraid to tell everyone I know about it.  But one thing that’s held a lot of friends back from getting chickens is space. If you don’t have the space for a run, can you even keep chickens?  The answer is yes, and the main solution […]

When we first decided to get chickens for our backyard, we had difficulty deciding how many we wanted.  Now, we’re asked this question all the time by people who want to get into a more self-sufficient home.  The best way to start figuring out this answer is to ask yourself: How many chickens do I need […]

When we first talked about getting chickens with my kids, they asked about a million questions about their new family members (as kids often do!).  My youngest threw me off when he asked me about chicken bedtime.  I turned to my wife, who’s more of the expert, and she didn’t have a clear answer either.  […]