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We’ve had chickens for a decade, raising most from chicks. If you want to raise chicks, your season starts now: From this week through to the end of April the Bothell Feed Center is selling baby chicks. We currently have Rock Star and Plymouth Barred Rock birds, but Orpingtons and Australorps are our favorite breeds (gentle, good layers, not so destructive).

Chicks are easy for the first month or so- you just need a box, a lamp, and some starter feed. After they turn into pullets it gets more complicated as they’re too small to be outside and fend off cats and older chickens, but too big to be in a box. Ours live in our shower, which simplifies cleanup. We also built a simple “chicken tractor” that’s just a folding child play pen with an old screen door on top. The tractor gets them out of the house for the day while fending off cats and the other chickens.

Chicks are sexed but sometimes unsuccessfully, which you’ll learn about with the first crow you hear. You’ll also find that young roosters do not wait for dawn to crow- they are happy to crow all night long. Dumping roosters is surprisingly easy through Craig’s List though- so long as you say magic words like “free” and “I’ll deliver” you should hear back within 5 minutes from some good home out there.

We give our chickens full run of the yard, which they love but makes for more work. We have 5 foot fence all around, portable chicken wire boxes to lay over scratched up grass, and solid wood paths and chicken wire mats over everything we don’t want scratched up.

Our coop is a simple design that’s 8 feet tall, 8 feet wide, and 4 feet deep- this matches up with the standard length of lumber and width of chicken wire, plus it’s easy to stand in. The laying enclosure is just an old cabinet from our kitchen with 2 old drawers for nesting boxes.

The chickens roost at the top of the coop. There are two separate paths from the landing that lead up to separate roosting sticks. This makes it easy for flocks to merge, as new chickens can stay clear of the older chickens. In the winter we also have a timer set up with a couple 60 watt flood lights- chickens must have 14 hours of light a day to reliably lay.

The whole thing works because of a brilliant piece of engineering called the VSB chicken door (sold on ebay from the UK). It opens a door at dawn and closes it at dusk, closing them up in their coop and fending off raccoons. To further raccoon proof things we added an electric fence around the outer enclosure for the coop. This sometimes needs to be hooked up in the winter if the raccoons set about terrorizing the chickens- shock them once and they won’t come back!

[Ed note: if you’re interested in chickens, you may want to check out Seattle Tilth’s classes at the Good Shepherd Center, including Start with Baby Chicks and City Chickens 201: The Integrated Flock.]