We need to talk. My basic laying/breeding flock is one rooster and seven hens. My main purpose for having chickens is for meat. The eggs are just a nice side benefit though I need them for hatching. I’ve found a food bank that gladly takes the excess above what I use for eating and hatching or give to friends and relatives. There are times I get a lot of eggs, especially when I am evaluating which pullets to keep as replacements.
As far as breeds go, practically any dual purpose breed will work. Sixty or seventy years ago certain breeds were developed for meat but with the development of the Cornish Cross broilers those have not been bred for meat in many decades. As far as meat goes there is not that much difference in any of the dual purpose breeds you get from most of the hatcheries these days. What I suggest is that you start out with a fairly large number of chicks of different breeds that would be acceptable and breed the ones you like while eating the others. For your purposes there is no reason to keep all the same breed. My flock is mixed breed. Part of the fun of hatching for me is to see what strange or different combinations of color and pattern I get.
Since you are afraid of red chickens do not get any red or buff chickens. Those have the “gold” gene and after a generation or two you could get red chickens. There are a lot of white, black, and barred dual purpose chickens out there that should work fine for you.
You need to decide how many chickens you eat in a year. With trips to relatives, going to an occasional play, eating out or with friends, and vacations my number is 40. Look at freezer space too. My garden is 50’ x 75’ and with all the additional fruit and berries I have freezer space is at a premium. That’s one big reason I don’t do meaties. Those have to be butchered at a certain age and I just don’t have freezer space for that. I can leave my dual purpose chickens walking around until freezer space opens up. I do have to feed them but they forage a lot so it’s not too bad.
You can cook and eat any chicken of any age or sex and they can be tender and delicious. It’s all in how you cook them. The older they are the slower and moister you need to cook them. I’ve cooked very old roosters and had them come out delicious. I’ll cook a five month old cockerel this afternoon in one of those ceramic baking dishes that has a lid with a good seal. He’s been thawing in the fridge since Sunday. I’ll rinse him off but not dry him, coat him in herbs, basil, oregano, and maybe parsley, then cook him for about 2-1/2 hours at 250 degrees Fahrenheit. If he were an old rooster I might make coq au vin, stew him, chicken and dumplings, or cook him this way but at 240 degrees for maybe 4 hours.
Home grown chickens are older than the broilers when you process them and do require different cooking methods than the 8 to 10 week old chicks you buy at the store. They can have more texture and flavor which puts some people off. But if you know how to cook them, they can be delicious and tender. Since you plan to hatch them mainly to eat, you will be eating as many pullets as cockerels.
Is your garden raised beds or just an area that you plant in rows? There are different techniques to handle different types. There are different ways to handle different gardens and different growing seasons. Mts. K hit on a fairly good one, partition your garden off into sections and use one section for a run while the other sections are used for food production. It doesn’t have to be halves, it can be thirds or some other division. You are only limited by our imagination. Let the chickens have one run until fall, then after harvest move them to a new section and let the one they were in lay fallow until spring. The manure will have degraded to where it is safe to plant in. Fall is also a good time to clean out your coop and put the bedding on the garden so it is ready to plant in the spring.
To raise enough chickens for meat with only one rooster and six or seven hens you need an incubator. Even if you have hens that go broody a lot you are not likely to get enough chicks depending on broodies. If they do go broody a lot you may have trouble getting enough eggs to incubate. Figure out how many you need to hatch and set up a schedule of hatching and brooding them yourself to get what you need. I normally hatch about 15 to 20 in February/March then play it by ear. If I get enough broodies later I’m Ok but if not I hatch and brood a second time.
Every year I keep three or four replacement pullets, keep the previous year’s pullets over winter, and eat the oldest hens when they molt in the fall and stop laying. This keeps my flock young and laying well.
Build your facilities big. Although my basic flock is eight chickens I seldom have just eight. Most summers I top out at about 40 chickens of various ages at one time. Even during the winter I often carry fifteen or more total. It just depends on when my last hatch for the season is. You have to stay flexible. You might follow the link in my signature below for my thoughts on space needs. I don’t give you hard and fast numbers that you absolutely need to follow, just things to think about. We are each so unique there is no one magic number that really covers us all.
I also suggest you build extra facilities. A separate grow-out coop with its own run and right next to the main coop so they can see each other has come in really handy. The extra flexibility that gives you makes it so much easier to handle problems. I also built my brooder as a permanent part of the main coop. As long as you have electricity to your coop you can keep them out of the house and that helps integration tremendously. For your stated goals build big and build to be flexible. As Mrs. K said, plans do change as you gain experience.
Something else. You will probably be integrating a lot. Be generous in roost space. I’m not talking about so many linear inches per chicken but more about spreading the roosts out a bit. Chickens can be pretty brutal to younger/weaker chickens on the roosts so they need a safe place to go that is not the nests. I put up a separate roost, lower than the main roosts, higher than the nests, and separated horizontally from the main roosts so the weaker have a safe place to go that is not the nests.
That’s enough rambling this morning. Hope you get something beneficial from it.
