My Pet Chicken Blog

This week, the “Listen Lissa” chicken advice column got a few queries about  the “news” story regarding the weirdest argument against backyard chickens, yet: chickens make you look poor. Wait, what? It’s true: apparently there is a subset of people who believe that  you should not keep chickens because “chickens make you look poor.” Wowza. […]

I have strange chickens…that is my  only explanation. My chickens actually like mustard eggs. I have been trying different techniques to break my one hen from the bad habit of egg eating.  After running into problems with my roll-away nesting box design I decided to try mustard filled eggs.  This is a ‘fix’ that we recommend in our help pages and many readers […]

Chickens and dogs: they don’t naturally get along. A reader writes to “Listen Lissa,” asking how to handle the loss of her chickens to a neighbor’s dogs: My neighbors’ dog gets out of their house a lot. Twice he got into my enclosed chicken yard and has now killed half of my hens. How do […]

This week is our local 4-H county fair. Although the midway and shows are fun I’ll be spending most my time with the animal exhibits.  My 9 year old daughter will be showing  her chicken, Isa,  for the fourth year. At our house, showing chickens means we create a chicken spa for the lucky pet chicken! […]

Listen Lissa! That’s the working name of my new chicken advice column, sort of like a “Dear Abby” (but for chickens!), being launched here today. “Listen Lissa! I have a problem with my daughter’s favorite pet hen…”

Do your chickens have enough sense to come in out of the rain? Probably not. Actually, that your flock would “come in out of the rain” is not necessarily sensible behavior… not for chickens. A rainy day can be a good day for a chicken to forage more widely than normal. On overcast days, the extra […]

The ladies are now laying like crazy!  All our hens are laying, so we are getting eggs almost daily. This is the good news; the bad news is that Isa is not completely broken of egg eating. Unfortunately, my DIY roll-away nestbox is not working as well as planned.  We are getting some eggs from her, and she has […]

There are lots of benefits to keeping chickens. One of my favorites is that, if you garden, you can use your composted chicken manure as fertilizer. But what you might not know is just how many chicken manure benefits there are. Composted manure is composted manure, right? Wrong! There are chicken manure benefits you may […]