Bought a house - previous owner moved to a town home so we kept the chickens. There is a decent amount of space on the property, and half of it is a forested hillside.
Any suggestions for a newbie? A new coop is definitely first thing on my list. And a fence around the property.
One of the chickens is an outcast and I feel bad for her, doesn’t leave the coop when the others go out in the yard and doesn’t eat treats from the ground just food from the feeder. The other chickens get along well it seems.
I fed my chicken their own well crushed egg shells.
I had an overly complicated process of first microwaving the eggshells so they’d be super dry and crispy, then whizzing them in an old blender dedicated to the job of grinding eggshells. Hens liked it rougher, but the ducks demanded shells ground to powder so they could do the ducky thing of scooping up a bunch, dipping it in water, and then muddling it into a milky sauce that they splattered all over. Ducks are sooo messy compared to chickens.
I prefer to add eggshells to my compost so my plants get calcium since eggshells are easy to pulverize with a atick or muddle and supplement calcium for the chickens with calcium carbonate or baked oyster/clamshells. The clamshells are a lot harder to break, you have to bake them well to get them as brittle as oystershells but it’s cheaper.