Shades of Green: Backyard chickens

Green meter: dark green

Raising a small flock of chickens in your backyard is a excellent way of creating a more sustainable atmosphere for your family.  Chickens are excellent pets, require minimal care, and are relatively inexpensive to purchase and care for.  And in turn, chickens provide you with a rich, healthy source of food: eggs!

To answer that lingering question that always pops up: NO, you do not need a rooster to produce edible eggs.  You do need a rooster to produce fertilized eggs and in turn raise a flock from hatchings.  Hens lay approximately 4 to 5 eggs per week (about one egg every day and a half on average) in healthy conditions. Our flock of seven hens give us approximately a half-dozen eggs per day in optimal conditions; on average, they lay a little over three dozen eggs per week.

Chickens support sustainable living not only by producing backyard food, but also reduce your overall waste by consuming table scraps.  We supplement our small flock with any and all non-compostable table scraps, along with a fair helping of compostable table scraps; in short, we give them just about all of our scraps that do not contain meat.  Chickens are little scavengers, eating just about anything they scratch out of the ground. 

Chickens also provide an excellent source of nitrogen-rich compostable waste.  We use a pine bedding for our girls and change it out twice-monthly.  We then compost the bedding material along with all the waste they leave behind.  This breaks down quickly and provides me with an excellent fertilizer for both my vegetable garden and landscaping plants.  Additionally, I will shovel out the areas around their run for rich, black, nitrogen-rich soil that they kick out of the fence while scratching.

By maintaining a small vegetable garden and raising a small flock of chickens, it is easily feasable to serve several meals per week only from your garden!  Not only does this help trim the grocery bill, but it is also an excellent way to practice sustainable living!