Attractive Chicken Coops for the Home Poultry Keeper

Keeping a few laying hens at home is a great way to enjoy really fresh eggs as well as having the pleasure of watching the antics of your hens.

If you've spent years getting your garden into an ordered and decorative paradise, you probably want something a little more attractive to house your hens than just a plain box construction.

Modernists have been falling in love with the plastic igloo style of hen houses now available but plastic poultry houses do not always suit the feel of a more traditional garden.

Luckily there are many attractive traditional styled houses and arks to allow you to keep your hens in style and comfort. This practical as well as decorative hen house pictured below is available via this web site.

It's a Lenham Chicken Coop 503 from Forsham, who are a long established manufacturer with an excellent reputation for quality poultry housing and equipment.

Chicken Coop Poultry House

It will accommodate 6 laying birds or 3 large fowl hens with cockerel. Not that you'd want a cockerel in the back garden! Unless both you and your neighbours enjoy the dawn chorus. Do remember when buying a poultry house that chickens come in a variety of sizes and check with your supplier if you have a larger breed or they may be cramped.

Easy Cleaning Hen House

A good chicken house should be designed to ease many of the more tedious tasks that accompany keeping hens, such as cleaning. Not the most pleasant of jobs, as we know, so making it easier is always a bonus.

Some poultry houses feature removable nest boxes and side walls, removable perching, full length ridge ventilation, and carrying handles. All of these make life easier. The internal arrangements should be made to keep cleaning as easy as possible, if only because a clean house is less likely to become infested with parasites.

Nest Boxes

An external access nest box makes collecting eggs easy, lift the lid, pick up the eggs and the job is done. Of course, this depends on your hens being co-operative and laying where they should. Unfortunately not all hens are so accommodating.

Removable Angled Perching

In the house pictured the removable perching has been arranged in two banks either side of the central pop hole door and are angled to rise away from the door. This encourages the early roosting birds to occupy the highest perches and, therefore, the furthest from the door so avoiding congestion - even the birds at the bottom end of the pecking order get a perch.

It's important to ensure there is plenty of perching space with some to spare or the hen at the bottom of the pecking order may be driven off.

It's important to ensure the design is such that the hens cannot get under the perching, so are barred access to accumulated night droppings

Poultry Housing - More Information