Is it worth keeping chickens at home?

Home raised chickens are not the cheap source of eggs that many gardeners expect, but they do add value to your vegetable patch.

Enthusiastic chicken keeper Walter Dendl says if you calculate the amount of food you have to buy for them (laying pellets and mash) and the amount of eggs you get, it’s not economical.

And a chicken coop can cost upwards of $1000 if you want to provide enough outside space, laying rooms and security against predators like cats and dogs.

“But the backyard eggs taste better,” says Dendl, who has kept chickens for more than 10 years.

And his five chickens add value in so many other ways, says Dendl, who also tends bees on his 700m² inner city Pt Chevalier property.

Apart from the eggs, they provide manure for the compost and garden (you’re encouraged to clean out the coop once a week – laying shredded newspaper, woodchip, hay or sawdust helps with this task). They also dig out pests and grubs in the garden and eat food scraps from the kitchen. You have to fence them in when targeting specific areas of the garden you want weeded, or to keep them away from valued vegetable seedlings because they eat everything.

Feeding and providing daily water can make it hard to go on holiday for extended periods of time, but Dendl has “great neighbours” who also get a share of the eggs.

Chickens are naturally forest dwellers and will lay under a hedge or bush if they aren’t trained to go into their chook house.

“When it gets dark, they go into their house and are left in boxes, which is where they lay their eggs. Sometimes they lay eggs on the ground inside the chicken house.”

They usually sell pullets (young hens) when they’re about 9 to 12 months, and this is about the time they start laying. Brown shavers and red shavers are good egg producers. They don’t live as long but while you’ve got them they’ll probably produce an egg a day.

“We have mongrels mixed between Bantams and light Sussex and what else is in there (He gets his chickens from farmer friends). We haven’t got pure breeds, we never have. You can have a mix between egg layers and meat chickens, but you’ve got to be prepared to kill them, which is, well, something else.

“When you have children, the chickens become more pets, they get names and you can’t kill Dolly or Betsy,” Dendl says.

“Chicken farms have extreme breeders and basically the chicken lays one egg a day for the whole year and very rarely has a miss. Whereas, if you get another breed they might have time off, they don’t lay and sometimes they get broody which means they want to be mothers, so sit on their eggs for maybe 3-4 weeks before they realise the egg won’t hatch.

“We don’t leave our chickens to sit on the eggs because what happens is they hardly ever leave the nests, they just go out and barely feed themselves so at about 3-4 weeks their condition is not very good, they’ve basically worn themselves out trying to hatch an unfertilised egg, so we usually take them off and house them in a separate cage.”

Hens may live in backyard flocks for 6-8 years, and most flocks will produce eggs for 3-4 years. The level of egg production, egg size, and shell quality decrease each year. Most commercial layers are kept for 2-3 years as their egg production decreases after this time.

You can find chickens for sale on Trade Me. But Dendl says you need the right temperament to tend chickens and enough space for them to run around in. Chickens have a distinct pecking order, and they will start attacking each other if their enclosure is too small.

JOHN BISSET Brown shavers are one of the best providers of eggs.