Homestead mailing list

["J Bailey" <jbmail AT isomedia.com>]

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Almost everyone keeps too many hens. Unless one wishes to have an egg
bizness, fewer hens works out. Eat when there are eggs, eat something
else when there aren't. We homesteader types get pretty heavy into
food preservation. I find it can become a bit onerous after a few decades.
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I lurk on this list, since we're a year into our new place and it only had a 
house on it. No fences or outbuildings at all. We're finally building the 
new hen coop we designed, so this is a great topic to come up. The last coop 
we built was way too big for our 7 banties. It was nice and insulated and 
matched the house, but waaay too big.

With our new one, we know we can only eat so many eggs. We don't mind 
bartering with neighbors, but I don't want to get into selling eggs from our 
front gate kind of thing. So we're only building a coop big enough for a 
rooster and a few hens. A neighbor who was moving gave us a nice cedar coop 
and his 3 older hens. They lay 2 a day, most days, one a day if it's too hot 
or too cold. If we have say 5 young laying hens (we're getting speckled 
sussex) that should be more than plenty for two people, assorted critters, 
and the occasional neighbor.

We'll use the old coop for meat birds, and mostly pasture feed them in 
rotation with our goats and heifer.

But I agree that it's way too easy to have too many hens for household egg 
supply. Kind of like starting too many tomato plants in the garden....

--Joanna of Seven Trees
www.seventrees.blogspot.com