Dear All,
I am a new backyard chickener from Ankara, Turkey. I've learned a lot from backyardchickens.com and wanted to say hi and thank you to this amazing community. Besides chickens I have African cichlids as pets. We have two kids and we wanted to get chickens primarily to our kids with high quality fresh right from our backyard.
I built our coop myself primarily by following the instructions in this video. Here are two pictures of how it turned out:
I've later put a roof over the run area, but I don't have its picture yet.
Currently I have six chickens: 5 Lohmann Browns and 1 ATAKS. You may not have heard of ATAKS as it is a hybrid breed developed in Turkey from Rhode Island Red and Barred Rock lineages.
I am a computer scientist by occupation (working in the academia) and I love automating things. Therefore, I've built several systems to make taking care of chickens easier. I've built a non-spill (well sort of) feeder, a nipple waterer with a large reservoir, and an automated chicken door.
I am especially proud of my automatic chicken door. It is using a raspberry pi executing a custom code that I wrote to close and open the door at night and in the morning. This was no simple task and I will be happy to share my experience on this in a later post. I also installed a webcam in my coop and I can check what my hens are doing and whether they have laid or not, even when I am out-of-town.
In general I am pretty happy as a new backyard chicken owner. Although I had a rough start and a few traumatic moments in the beginning due to buying chickens of various ages (should have made better research there to not mix adults with juveniles), I've eventually replaced the younglings and now have a balanced flock (for a few months now). They got used to each other and the pecking order is established.
Currently, my only problem is not getting enough eggs that I hoped I would get. On a good day, I get two eggs (from 6 chickens) but this happens very rarely. I usually have either one or zero. Especially now that the weather is cooling down, egg production seems to have decreased. Most of the eggs that I get come from the ATAKS variety, although in theory Lohmann Browns (LBs) are better layers. The fact that most my LBs appear to be moulting could also be a reason for the low egg production.
In Turkey it is difficult to find wholly organic layer feeds and therefore I am trying to feed my chicken with whole grains that I can find and kitchen scraps. My motivation for getting chickens was not to feed them processed food so that's I try to avoid such food. We do a lot of home cooking so a I am often providing them with good quality kitchen scraps (including meat, fish, vegetables, and fruits). As for the whole grains, I offer them wheat, barley, and lentils; but they seem to prefer the wheat most. For calcium, I try to provide them with crushed egg shelves. Their run material is sand so I find no reason to provide them with extra grit. I've also found some pigeon mix made of various grains and I sometimes throw a few handfuls in their run (they seem to like this).
I general I feel like I should improve the whole grain mix that I am feeding them. I am very open to suggestions about this. I've heard that the protein content of a good quality grain mix should be at least 16%, and I feel like my grains are falling short of that. Also I am not sure if the crushed egg shells is providing them sufficient calcium (did not observe any soft shelled eggs though).
Well, this has been a long post but I wanted to say hello and share my initial experiences as a backyard chicken owner. I am looking forward to learning many things from this amazing community. Keeping chickens is indeed a great experience and sharing with other enthusiasts just multiplies the fun.
I am a new backyard chickener from Ankara, Turkey. I've learned a lot from backyardchickens.com and wanted to say hi and thank you to this amazing community. Besides chickens I have African cichlids as pets. We have two kids and we wanted to get chickens primarily to our kids with high quality fresh right from our backyard.
I built our coop myself primarily by following the instructions in this video. Here are two pictures of how it turned out:
I've later put a roof over the run area, but I don't have its picture yet.
Currently I have six chickens: 5 Lohmann Browns and 1 ATAKS. You may not have heard of ATAKS as it is a hybrid breed developed in Turkey from Rhode Island Red and Barred Rock lineages.
I am a computer scientist by occupation (working in the academia) and I love automating things. Therefore, I've built several systems to make taking care of chickens easier. I've built a non-spill (well sort of) feeder, a nipple waterer with a large reservoir, and an automated chicken door.
I am especially proud of my automatic chicken door. It is using a raspberry pi executing a custom code that I wrote to close and open the door at night and in the morning. This was no simple task and I will be happy to share my experience on this in a later post. I also installed a webcam in my coop and I can check what my hens are doing and whether they have laid or not, even when I am out-of-town.
In general I am pretty happy as a new backyard chicken owner. Although I had a rough start and a few traumatic moments in the beginning due to buying chickens of various ages (should have made better research there to not mix adults with juveniles), I've eventually replaced the younglings and now have a balanced flock (for a few months now). They got used to each other and the pecking order is established.
Currently, my only problem is not getting enough eggs that I hoped I would get. On a good day, I get two eggs (from 6 chickens) but this happens very rarely. I usually have either one or zero. Especially now that the weather is cooling down, egg production seems to have decreased. Most of the eggs that I get come from the ATAKS variety, although in theory Lohmann Browns (LBs) are better layers. The fact that most my LBs appear to be moulting could also be a reason for the low egg production.
In Turkey it is difficult to find wholly organic layer feeds and therefore I am trying to feed my chicken with whole grains that I can find and kitchen scraps. My motivation for getting chickens was not to feed them processed food so that's I try to avoid such food. We do a lot of home cooking so a I am often providing them with good quality kitchen scraps (including meat, fish, vegetables, and fruits). As for the whole grains, I offer them wheat, barley, and lentils; but they seem to prefer the wheat most. For calcium, I try to provide them with crushed egg shelves. Their run material is sand so I find no reason to provide them with extra grit. I've also found some pigeon mix made of various grains and I sometimes throw a few handfuls in their run (they seem to like this).
I general I feel like I should improve the whole grain mix that I am feeding them. I am very open to suggestions about this. I've heard that the protein content of a good quality grain mix should be at least 16%, and I feel like my grains are falling short of that. Also I am not sure if the crushed egg shells is providing them sufficient calcium (did not observe any soft shelled eggs though).
Well, this has been a long post but I wanted to say hello and share my initial experiences as a backyard chicken owner. I am looking forward to learning many things from this amazing community. Keeping chickens is indeed a great experience and sharing with other enthusiasts just multiplies the fun.
We're thrilled you've decided to join us
Do you have access to a non-gmo vitamin pack? Something like 
Haven't been back since I was 17. I am this old now
and living in the US. 
