buy chickens
Garden Progress

Where can I buy chickens?

First of all you need to rethink this idea. Rather than buy chickens why not think, instead about rehoming an ex battery hen through British Hen Welfare Trust? They are not just ex-battery hens, some are ex caged hens. The difference being very subtle compared to how they will be living in your backyard!

buy chickens from a known charity
This is Esme a few days after we bought her from BHWT. She was missing a lot of feathers, but not as badly as one of her sisters, but they are now full on fluff butts

Reasons to buy chickens from a rehoming charity

  1. expert help and advice on hand all the time
  2. they are known to be daily layers of wonderful eggs, once they are fully free range eggs they will rock your socks off
  3. they are super confident and nosy confident ex battery hens
  4. our girls are fearless and very gentle with smaller children, this is also good for the kids as they want to rescue more chickens!
  5. hens bred for the mass market tend towards hardiness, they are the perfect ‘first’ chicken.
  6. our girls have grown feathers and become true garden divas!
to buy chickens or not to buy chickens?
we love the company of our girls in the garden.

Are you ready to buy chickens?

You need to get prepared for your chickens or ex-battery hens and then you can start to look at re homing dates.

Basic kits you will need in your backyard includes ;

a large chicken coop like this one should happily house 4-6 hens.

We then made the decision to get a chicken run like this one if you do decide to buy chickens, keep them safe as we wanted to have a secure enclosure for them during the day when we were at work. Urban foxes are absolute swines for taking any opportunity to eat your girls. So weld mesh dug around the perimeter has helped us a lot too.
These are essential as you can hang them up and get them away from muddy chicken feet.

Are ex-battery hens for you?

As a family we decided we wanted to move away from intensive farming. One way we thought we could do that was with growing our own food and this seemed like the next step. You can stock up on and still have plenty of fresh food for every day. So if you are at all worried about self sufficiency backyard chickens are the ultimate solution. Ex-battery hens live a long time and will be around 14 months when they come to stay with you. Although they are retired ours have been daily egg producers and we have really made our initial investment back in terms of money. However you will love to spend hours watching them mooch around the garden.

You can also buy chickens that are ex-battery hens from https://freshstartforhens.co.uk/ another great charity.

Other areas of self sufficiency you may like..

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Chloe's World
3 years ago

yes my girls are from bhwt and the are amazing little beings with huge personalities but they are addictive all I want to do is take all of them from my local cage farm and love them LOL xx