British chicken coop question

[IamRainey]

I think in the US the technical definition of a "coop" is also the enclosed building in which the chickens roost and lay. "Run" describes the outside space which is enclosed in some sort of protective mesh.

I've never known my hens to hang out in the coop when there's any daylight despite the fact that it's far larger than the ones I've seen on the British gardening shows. ...unless I'm in there -- a clue to how much bigger -- and their curiosity demands that they "supervise" whatever I'm up to.

 

[Ali James]

I am watching a good number of British gardening shows (Love Your Garden and Big Dreams, Small Spaces). Apparently chickens are a regular feature of backyard gardens. Consistently, they show chicken coops that are about the size of small dog houses. These adorable little hen houses are surrounded by chicken wire or picket fences 2'-3' high. Nothing is ever covered beyond the hen house roof. The coops don't seem to have nesting boxes.

Is this typical? Are there no predators? Do neighbors simply return chickens who've flown over boundary fences (also only 5'-7')? How are these coops cleaned out? Where do the hens lay their eggs? Or is this simply the delusion of TV production companies and their designers who are designing for an immediate video effect and not for any long term operation and maintenance?

Hi there,

I would agree with a previous post that keeping chickens in the suburban areas of the UK tends to be done mostly by the middle classes who want to be trendy and have a medium/large garden. On the whole, the hens are kept in an enclosed run, with the hen house itself inside the run. The hens might free range in the daytime. I'm not aware that people permanently keep their hens in those super tiny runs attached to the coops.

Foxes are the main predator, and maybe dogs. Foxes survive equally well in urban and rural settings here.

I imagine Brits would be rather put out by a roaming chicken in their gardens and demand it was removed immediately, swiftly followed by a complaint to the local council! We do tend to be rather territorial as a nation!

 

[featheredplanets]

I live in East Yorkshire and I find chicken keeping is very common here. It’s not typically good or responsible poultry keeping, but it is pretty rife.

I have noticed the thing with prefabs too! I see hundreds for sale new and second hand. I did buy one second hand for £10, put some wheels on it and I use it as a chicken tractor for any broodies. But I couldn’t imagine keeping more than 2 LF birds/3 bantams in the generic ones, there’s no where to put good roosts, no ventilation and the run is tiny. But for some reason people keep buying new ones and keeping whole flocks of chickens in them. Eglus are far too common as well. I don’t own one, wouldn’t catch me paying £300+ for one when I can buy a shed, fence posts, chicken wire and make myself a suitable one for the same price, maybe less!

Coop and run mean the same here. Coop - roost, lay. Run - protected outdoor area.

I have a big coop I was given by someone but I’m converting a shed into a coop instead.

On predators. As the others have said there’s only really foxes that pose a huge threat. I’ve never had dogs get in the garden. And there are lots of owls and hawks near me but none have caused any issues. There are snakes but none that will hurt a chicken. There are rats but you can solve that issue by investing in hardware cloth, same goes for weasels and polecats, though never heard of the latter two causing issues.

I think the problem is the lack of good husbandry and reliable knowledge. People see a cheap prefab and some cheap chickens and impulsively buy them. It’s said that 2 in 3 flocks in the UK have Infectious Bronchitis, yet except the keepers that use BYC, no one cares and no one is doing anything about it. There’s no real “farm store” like Tractor Supply(?), so the only well known places that sell poultry supplies are (generic pet stores) Pets at Home and Jollyes, who both only sell prefab coops. I’m sure if a farm store chain opened up and sold nice, big, sturdy coops, people would buy them. It’s the same with chicks, you can get them delivered to your front door, pre vaxxed and healthy in the US. In the UK the biggest ‘hatcheries’ are hybrid pullet raisers, so unless you make the hour(s) long trip to them, people buy from backyard breeders who usually give bad advice, breed poor quality ill birds and the cycle just goes round.

Maybe if along with that, gardening shows promoted correct poultry husbandry, a difference would start to be seen. It’s a real issue but not talked about for some reason.

 

[IamRainey]

Alert Monty Don!!! He's accessory to poultry malpractice and could put in a word on behalf of those backyard and allotment chickens.

 

[IamRainey]

Since I'm on a roll here and getting all this interpretation of what I see on TV can I ask a gardening question too?

Every time Monty Don opens a bag of something he calls it "compost". Is there really all that commercially available compost in Britain?

To me compost means the richly organic stuff that Mother Nature and I collaborate on in the back corner of my backyard. It's dense and black and really kinda rich for plants all by itself. What comes from the nursery is "potting mix" or "seed starting mix" complete with vermiculite, etc. All in all, it's light stuff that will amend and refresh garden soil or get your tender new plants started.

We can buy compost but it's expensive and, frankly, sorta second rate or iffy stuff.

So my question is, is there really affordable compost readily available from commercial producers or do we have a bit of English English v American English going on here?

 

[Perris]

'compost' is the generic name for a wide range of stuff sold in bags here. I would expect it to be dense and richly organic and it would not normally include vermiculite (nor peat). Labelled variations exist for e.g. seeds, acid-loving plants, summer bedding, tomatoes. Some councils recycle gardening waste into compost too, so a sort of community compost heap of the type in your backyard and usually sold quite cheap!

 

[Kris5902]

You're not in the market for one of these coops, but surely a person who is interested in buying one would read beyond the introduction. If someone is going to fork out between 550-950 pounds/dollars and doesn't look at the specs or read through the page (which is hardly onerous), well... I don't really know what to say!

To be fair, compared to other coop companies referenced on this site, Omlet give a more realistic idea of how many chickens can be kept in their coops. They do qualify their initial "up to ten" statement and give a guideline for the different sizes. It's in the specifications section, right under "How much space do I need to keep chickens?" - not obscured in small print.

I've not seen their advertising, only their website and I don't understand what you mean by this:


I don't watch TV, so maybe that's part of it!

Regarding size, I agree with this:


The way I use it, the "coop" is both the (plastic) cube and (metal mesh) run together; that's where they are confined, if need be. However, this is rare. They have free access to a much larger area to roam in, within a movable fence. @IamRainey this fence is 1.25m high (4.1 foot) and the chickens stay within it, barring exceptional circumstances. This roaming area is not covered.

So sorry, as I appear to have personally offended you. This was not my intent. I am not in a market for an eglu or any other prefab I have too many chickens for them, and I cannot fathom spending $800-1400 CAD on it. I also had no idea they were so expensive!. As for the “advertisement”, it pops up here on my feed on BYC between the posts, as do ads for Solar panel kits, well pumps, soap molds, beads, books on pasture raising livestock, and anything I’ve recently viewed on amazon. All I see is the picture of the lady and the coop, with three chickens in the small run and the brand.

I am completely off grid with only cellular data, so I don’t know how else this coop is advertised, and sadly haven’t watched a gardening show in about two and a half years. That was the first time I visited the website, as an example of a small coop I had seen advertised, and noted the 10 chicken claim right below the picture. Here in North America, manufacturers of prefab coops are notorious for overstating the numbers of chickens they can reasonably hold. I did look at some Prefabs for my backyard about five years ago for in my semi-urban home’s backyard, until I reaserched local chicken regulations and realized I would need to own an entire city block to meet them!

In closing I have to say that I don’t think the eglu conforms to 4sq feet of coop space per bird and 10sq feet of run space which is often recommended here. Neither do my breeding tractors though. This doesn’t mean I believe it is inadequate for every chicken keeping scenario, nor was my comment ment as a direct attack on the manufacturer or you. Again I am very sorry that I have so deeply offended you @Stiletto

 

[Stiletto]

So sorry, as I appear to have personally offended you. This was not my intent. I am not in a market for an eglu or any other prefab I have too many chickens for them, and I cannot fathom spending $800-1400 CAD on it. I also had no idea they were so expensive!. As for the “advertisement”, it pops up here on my feed on BYC between the posts, as do ads for Solar panel kits, well pumps, soap molds, beads, books on pasture raising livestock, and anything I’ve recently viewed on amazon. All I see is the picture of the lady and the coop, with three chickens in the small run and the brand.

I am completely off grid with only cellular data, so I don’t know how else this coop is advertised, and sadly haven’t watched a gardening show in about two and a half years. That was the first time I visited the website, as an example of a small coop I had seen advertised, and noted the 10 chicken claim right below the picture. Here in North America, manufacturers of prefab coops are notorious for overstating the numbers of chickens they can reasonably hold. I did look at some Prefabs for my backyard about five years ago for in my semi-urban home’s backyard, until I reaserched local chicken regulations and realized I would need to own an entire city block to meet them!

In closing I have to say that I don’t think the eglu conforms to 4sq feet of coop space per bird and 10sq feet of run space which is often recommended here. Neither do my breeding tractors though. This doesn’t mean I believe it is inadequate for every chicken keeping scenario, nor was my comment ment as a direct attack on the manufacturer or you. Again I am very sorry that I have so deeply offended you @Stiletto

Oh gosh, no need to apologise for that, you haven't offended me!

Thank you for explaining the ads - I have an ad blocker so I don't see any of them!

Yes, they are expensive. I initially balked and resisted buying one because of the price. Initially, we'd made a very rustic semi-open coop underneath some of our solar panels. I had the idea of a coop that I could move about the property so the chickens could have fresh grass, more natural shade in the summer, etc. - this was before I'd ever read or heard of a chicken tractor and realised they were a thing! We're up on a mountain, on rocky terrain where nothing is flat, so a portable wooden structure wouldn't work as the ground is too uneven. A good friend was egging me on (if you pardon the pun!) to buy one as she'd had a Cube for years and swore by it. It has a number of practical features, but for me, the portability is what sets it apart from anything else. We often have to move it quite a distance to the next appropriate spot, which is why a plastic coop on wheels makes that possible, though at times we've dismantled the whole thing and carried it in bits, or in the pick-up.

By the way, we are also completely off grid. Fortunately we have a 4G LTE internet connection (via antennae and a long cable) as we don't get enough of a mobile phone signal to reliably text or call, let alone for data!

 

[Kris5902]

Oh gosh, no need to apologise for that, you haven't offended me!

Thank you for explaining the ads - I have an ad blocker so I don't see any of them!

Yes, they are expensive. I initially balked and resisted buying one because of the price. Initially, we'd made a very rustic semi-open coop underneath some of our solar panels. I had the idea of a coop that I could move about the property so the chickens could have fresh grass, more natural shade in the summer, etc. - this was before I'd ever read or heard of a chicken tractor and realised they were a thing! We're up on a mountain, on rocky terrain where nothing is flat, so a portable wooden structure wouldn't work as the ground is too uneven. A good friend was egging me on (if you pardon the pun!) to buy one as she'd had a Cube for years and swore by it. It has a number of practical features, but for me, the portability is what sets it apart from anything else. We often have to move it quite a distance to the next appropriate spot, which is why a plastic coop on wheels makes that possible, though at times we've dismantled the whole thing and carried it in bits, or in the pick-up.

By the way, we are also completely off grid. Fortunately we have a 4G LTE internet connection (via antennae and a long cable) as we don't get enough of a mobile phone signal to reliably text or call, let alone for data!

I’m glad we understand where we are both coming from. I was worried you misunderstood my post. And yes, I can see how with proper management and in some circumstances they could be quite ideal. I almost never click on the ads to further investigate because up until recently cellular data has been prohibitively expensive (Canada) I’m lucky to have plenty of reasonably flat terrain and my wooden tractors still sometimes have issues with it. So far my biggest challenges have been adequate shade and dealing with lots of snow, which is a rarity here, but my chickens refused to leave the “coop” portion of their tractor in it and it seemed horribly cramped (apparently my chickens agree with me on that frozen white stuff!) I would be concerned with anything that small. My chickens are apparently not “winter” birds, but the small cute wooden coops like the pic @IamRainey posted look to be more static. And probably mostly ornamental.

 

[woodworm]

Hi, I'm in the UK (North Wales) and am currently researching building my first coop and run. Our local garden centres all sell these prefab things.

Where I am I have foxes and badgers, and I think a badger especially could break through an Eglu or similar in seconds. My parents have kept chickens here most of their lives and even though their run is open (just a fence to keep chickens in) they have only been visited by Mr Fox once in over 40 years - lucky I suspect.

Personally I plan to build my own but hope to make it look reasonably attractive as it's going to be quite a 'feature' in our garden.