Why Build A Hen House?
When I was a kid my uncle kept Bantam chickens and for the life of me I couldn’t understand why.
Their eggs were tiny, the hen house that he had was basically an altered shade house. The door that we collected the eggs through had a reputation throughout the neighborhood as one of the most vicious known to man. These days it would probably have been seen as a torture device and torn down!
As you are probably aware, Bantam eggs are the tiniest eggs out, one barely covers a corner of a piece of toast, so I couldn”t understand why my cousins would fight over the ‘privilege’ of getting the eggs in the morning and feeding the chickens!
So when my husband came up with the idea of farming our own chickens I shuddered at the thought, and then I had a flashback to the good times that we’d had at my uncles place with the chooks.
The hen house may have been a converted shade house, but my cousins had been allowed to decorate it and man, had they let their imagination flow!
There were rainbows, chickens, roosters, sparrows, farmers, rivers, trees, suns, moons, stars and even frogs and pigs – The Muppet Show and Kermit were huge influences in those days!
And as for the chickens?
Bantams may be small, but boy their personality is big!
I’m sure that my cousins were too scared not to feed the birds because boy, when they got going they could tell you off so loudly the whole neighborhood could tell that something was up! Seriously.
Once my uncle even got a phone call from one of the neighbors asking if there was a problem because his chickens were creating such a stir. Unc went out there to see what was going on he found one of my cousins baled up by the chickens all screeching at him to put the bucket that he was carrying down!
So with some trepidation I agreed to start farming chickens, “but only 2!”.
We built our own hen house in the backyard, that was seven years ago.
Four children, just as many hen houses and 20 chickens later we are hooked.
The best part is that when we build our next hen house all the kids will be able to help decorate it…..Maybe we’ll go with a Muppets theme!