Backyard or Urban Chickens

Our 2 Golden Wyandottes :  Blackie and Brownie

Anyone familiar with the local food movement knows the first level entails growing food at home. Our family subscribes to this belief and besides some of our own fruits and vegetables we decided to raise hens in our backyard for their eggs.
To many people, raising chickens in an Urban environment may seem a little crazy, but many of our grandparents had victory gardens and knew how to grow vegetables, can food, and raised their own chickens. Unfortunately, this valuable knowledge and these experiences seem to have skipped a generation or two. My wife and I are anxious to bring these skills and experiences back, so that our children will not be so far removed from them. We feel it is extremely important our Daughters know where food comes from... and not simply the grocery store shelves.
Raising hens in our backyard is a tremendous opportunity for us to not only teach them about where eggs come from, but also the responsibility that comes with caring for a pet. Due to the small size and friendly demeanor of hens, young children can easily handle them.

 Our Rhode Island Red: Ginger

We got our chickens as week old chicks at a local feed store. The chicks had to grow to maturity before they began to lay eggs, and to be honest, 6 months seemed like a pretty long time of feeding, watering and cleaning up after without the benefit of fresh eggs, but once they started laying it began to really pay off.

We have a good sized area in our far backyard with lots of shade from an avacado tree for our chickens to roam free. The remainder of the time we let our chickens pasture in the main back yard. They pretty much have free range of our entire backyard when ever they want it because all they have to do is fly on over a 6 foot high concrete block wall to get to the lawn...and thats really not too difficult for them.
We have read that the average laying duration for a chicken of 26-30 hours and our chickens do not dissapoint. The third hen that we have recently began laying eggs, so now we are getting about a dozen and a half eggs a week. The brown eggs are probabbly considered a size medium. The shells are thicker than store bought eggs and the yolks seem larger and are an amazing orangish-yellow color.

One study showed free-range or pasture-raised chicken eggs have  four to six times more vitamin D, three times more vitamin E, two-third more vitamin A, and seven times more beta carotene. They also have two times more omega-3 fatty acids, a firmer texture, and superior flavor.

We have found chickens are very low maintenance (you dont have to take them to the park to play frisbee) and they are very entertaining. There is nothing funnier than watching one run around the yard flapping its wings fearing for it's life as it's being chased by a song bird not 1/10th its size.
Our family has really come to love them as pets (that provide us with egg-stensive benefits) and we know that the eggs they produce are not hormone ridden, they are as fresh and local as one could possibly get, and that our chickens are free to live a happy chicken existence, scratching for bugs and picking clover out of the yard.

If you have questions about backyard or Urban chickens, the website below has a tremendous amount of information. And, if by chance, you cannot find what your looking for there,  you can get an answer by asking a question on the Forum.
http://www.backyardchickens.com