I’ve had chickens a number of times over the years. Chickens are hardy animals in general. Below are a few key things that you might keep in mind that over the years I’ve found especially useful to pay attention to.
Use of chicken manure in SPIN-Farming has to be carefully managed. Generally soils exposed to animal manure are supposed to go six months before you can plant and harvest edible plants in them. This is a food safety issue that can bite you badly if you aren’t on top of it.
Using chickens as part of your composting operation, in other words feeding them your garden and food food wastes, is an excellent way of reducing the need for feed for them as well as producing excellent compost for your SPIN garden. Restaurants and grocerys can be a good source of food waste for your chickens. But you need to run the resultant chicken manured compost through a further compost process to ensure that the manure is well rotted before adding it to your soil or using it as top dressing for beds: food safety issues again.
One generally reliable rule of thumb I suggest you keep in mind when raising young (and mature) chickens is to watch carefully to see if any of them begin to appear “hen pecked”. This is exactly as it sounds. One of the chickens will begin to look bad due to missing feathers. Stressed chickens tend to establish a pecking order, and the one at the bottom of the pecking order will get the cranky attention of all the other stressed chickens, and if the stress isn’t promptly relieved, will kill it. If the stress continues the next lowest in the pecking order gets pecked to death. So if you see a badly pecked young (or mature) chicken you know immediately that something is wrong with your chicken operation. If none of the chickens look pecked this is usually a pretty good sign that all is probably well in chicken land.
You should also pay attention to what’s going on around and on your property. Do you have feral cats? Raccoons? Coyotes? Other such varmints? Neighbor dogs running loose? It only takes a few minutes for a varmint that breaks into your coop to decimate a flock. So pay close attention to how they’re cooped when you first begin keeping them outside. It’s heartbreaking to deal with the aftermath of a varmint attack.
Even full grown chickens are vulnerable to varmints, even when running loose in a penned yard. You may think that a high fence keeps them safe from varmints, and it generally does, unless you have raptors. You may have to run chicken wire over the top of your chicken run to protect them from raptors.
