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Keep Chickens! Tending Small Flocks in Cities, Suburbs, and Other Small Spaces
Keep Chickens Tending Small Flocks in Cities Suburbs and Other Small Spaces Author:Barbara Kilarski Chickens are hot! There's a chicken-farming boomlet on the rise, with upscale urban and suburban homeowners from every part of the country ordering fancy breeds of chickens, hiring architects to build elegant chicken coops in their backyards, and signing up for classes on how to raise a happy, healthy flock in a small space.Now Barbara Kilarski,... more » a woman with a passion for poultry, offers a handbook that is as practical and encouraging as it is witty and entertaining. THE TOWN & COUNTRY CHICKEN provides the detailed information every aspiring chickenkeeper needs to know.Like home-grown vegetables, home-raised chickens put us in touch with our rural past, give us a sense of self-sufficiency, and provide food - eggs! - for the table that is a lot tastier than anything we could find at the supermarket. And chickens are fun! Like dogs, they bond with their owners, and like kids, they do the darnedest things.Kilarski regales the reader with tales spotlighting the joys of raising chickens, while at the same time explaining the nitty-gritty details of how to be a successful chicken keeper. Any way you look at it, chickens are a star of the domestic household. They are easy and inexpensive to raise, they don't need much living space, and they provide eggs for free. No dog or cat on the planet can make the same claim.« less
Great book for anyone looking into raising chickens. It tells you everything you need to know from building a coop to picking out chicks and how to raise them and has lots of black and white drawings and a few color pics of some breeds and a few pics of some neat chicken coops.
Overall it is a good book with lots of info.
Although I haven't actually tried out any of the advice in this book, it seems like a good primer on starting to raise chickens, especially if you are getting your start in the city. She tends to spend a good amount of time focused on chickens as pets, even going so far as to suggest that even if you don't want chickens for eggs or meat, you may still enjoy them as pets. Maybe I'm just too practically minded, but I thought that was a bit goofy. On the other hand, I did enjoy some of the stories of the hijinks her chickens got into.
The book covers the basics on choosing and ordering or buying chicks, breeds, building a coop/henhouse, caring for chicks, feeding and caring for chickens, what to expect from neighbors and the law, and even some recipes to use up your eggs. I think I'm going to want to look at a book that's more detailed in some areas, but this is definitely a good start and a quick read.
Tonya (lifeonmars) - 
