I have no chicken right now but I am ready to built my coop. I have been looking at all the pics of coops and have gotten some great ideas. Now just to draw them up. I live in Baltimore City, MD and must have a movable pen with only four hens. I would love to hear from anyone with ideas, place to get chicks, and just anyone.
how movable do you want your pen? like moveable as in when you move it can be taken down easy and moved or moveable as in to move it daily like a chicken tractor? there are a lot of great hatcheries that are here in the ad space located above the tab line ... and there are also a lot of great breeders here on the forum
Welcome! We are new to chickens too but are a few months ahead of you. You are going to like them more than you thought! My husband made our coop from materials we mostly had laying around. When we account for all the food we had to feed our chicks before they started producing eggs, we were glad our investment in the coop itself was small. Ours works well and my husband designed it himself. I'd post a pic but have a hard time doing that here on BYC as I'm not that savvy with message boards. But we spent more on food/waterers and feeders/snacks and other supplies than we did on the coop. We ended up with three breeds but have a definite preference for our Buff Orpingtons. Very good for beginners, very docile and friendly, easy to catch. Lovely eggs. We also like our Rhode Island Reds but we would just get Buff Orpingtons if we had it to do over. We purchased from a local feed store and that worked out really well. We bought extra thinking we would lose some, but since we bought them local and they were nice and healthy, we raised them all. And the breeds were correct for our area which is pretty cold as we are in SW Washington. BYC has been an excellent source of all kinds of information for us and helped us every step of the way. Plan for more than you think you will want. You may catch chicken fever!
A couple of places to look for chicks are to order them from online. Here is a helpful thread with many hatcheries to look at... https://www.backyardchickens.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=189569 And also, usually in the Spring, some feed stores carry chicks. Maybe take a look at craigslist. Some people have large bunny houses, building materials, and some have chicken coops. Good luck in your search! --SSF
Hi and Welcome from Baltimore County!! The My Pet Chicken web site (on that list someone above me mentioned) is probably best for you because that site allows you to buy a handful of chickens instead of 25 or 100, which you can't have in the city, even if you wanted them all. The site also has a nice 'chicken selector' tool that helps you find the breeds that best suit your needs. If you can wait until spring, places such as the Mill Store (one in Hereford, one in Bel Air) will have chicks for sale. For chicken tractor plans, we found a good one in the book Chicken Coops by Judy Pangman. We keep our chickens in their tractor all year long. It is an A-frame with a screen door that opens one whole side of the A. We keep that screen door opened during the day and lock it at night. The tractor is heavy, but we only move it every couple weeks since our chickens only stay in the tractor at bedtime or in the snow. The rest of the days they spend walking around in a fenced yard.
