Keeping Chickens and How Your Shed and Omlet Can Get the Job Done

The Ultimate Backyard Companion for your chucks

The garden shed has always been the heart of the British backyard—a sanctuary for tools, a workshop for hobbies, or simply a quiet retreat. But for a growing number of adventurous shed owners, it’s becoming something much more exciting: a vibrant, safe, and custom-built home for a thriving flock of backyard chickens. Keeping chickens is a great hobby, one that offers not only the joy of companionship and quirky personalities but also the rewarding bounty of fresh eggs year-round.

If you’ve been contemplating joining the ranks of backyard chicken keepers, spring is the prime time to start your flock or upgrade your setup. This comprehensive guide will walk you through the necessities, from utilising your garden shed to choosing the right gear from Omlet, ensuring your journey into hen-keeping is successful, secure, and genuinely rewarding.

The Great Shed Conversion: Building a Chicken Sanctuary

The garden shed offers unparalleled benefits as a foundation for a spacious chicken coop or a generously sized run extension. Most people think of their shed as a place for mere storage, but it can be transformed into a spacious, safe, and sheltered habitat for your feathered friends. A chicken shed conversion is both fun and practical. Since chickens are social creatures that thrive in the company of others, your garden shed becomes the perfect social spot where they can eat, drink, and comfortably roost.

One of the greatest practical advantages of converting a section of your shed into a hen house is the height it provides. You can stand up comfortably while cleaning the coop, collecting eggs, grooming your chickens, and topping up feeders, making daily interactions much easier than with traditional low-slung coops that require kneeling or bending. This ease of access encourages better hygiene and more frequent interaction, leading to happier, healthier birds.

Tips for Converting Your Shed:

1. Security First: Chickens are prey animals and need robust protection from predators, especially the persistent fox. Your shed walls provide an excellent barrier, but all entry points must be secured with pet-safe materials. This means inspecting the foundations—if your shed sits directly on the ground, predators can dig underneath. You can prevent this by installing a large aviary or run attached to one side of the shed and burying a wire mesh skirt around the perimeter to deter tunnelling. Attach this run securely to the shed and cut a small pop-hole for your chickens to enter and exit. This pop-hole must have a solid, lockable door to secure them at night.
2. Flooring and Litter: If your shed has a wooden floor, it must be protected from moisture and droppings, which can lead to rot and health issues. Cover the floor with a thick layer of absorbent bedding, such as wood shavings or chopped straw, using the deep litter method. Alternatively, you can lay lino or install a section of concrete flooring within the dedicated chicken area for easy hosing down. Regardless of the material, a droppings board placed directly beneath the roosting bars will catch the majority of waste, making daily spot cleaning incredibly quick.
3. Perching and Nesting: Chickens instinctively seek height to sleep (roosting) and prefer dark, private spaces to lay eggs (nesting). Install perching bars inside the shed, using smooth, rounded timber, ensuring they can be easily removed for cleaning. Position the roosts higher than the nesting boxes—this prevents the chickens from sleeping in the nesting boxes and fouling the area. For nesting, recycled items can be ingenious. One popular method involves taking an old chest of drawers, laying it on its side, and dividing the drawers into separate, cosy, dark sections to create ideal nesting boxes. Ensure they are lined with fresh straw.
4. Ventilation and Light: Adequate airflow is crucial for respiratory health, as ammonia fumes from droppings can quickly build up in enclosed spaces. If you have windows, block out the lower panes for security and privacy, but ensure the top pane is fitted with strong hardware cloth or chicken wire to allow cross-ventilation, especially during warmer months. On the outside, add a solid shutter that can be closed if heavy rain or gale-force winds are expected. Things like hardboard and even small extractor fans can be important additions to keep the air oxygenated.
5. Red Mite Management: While some people worry about wooden sheds harbouring red mites, it’s not the wood itself but the “nooks and crannies” that attract them. A well-designed wooden house without unnecessary crevices, combined with regular cleaning, dusting with food-grade diatomaceous earth, or using a red mite spray, can prevent problems before they start.

Omlet: The Right Gear for the Job

While a shed offers the perfect shell, the internal setup and external management require reliable, predator-resistant equipment. Omlet specialises in easy-to-clean, durable, and safe coops, runs, and accessories, which are designed to keep your workload to a minimum.

1. The Coop and Run:
For beginners or as secure sleeping quarters within your shed, a plastic chicken coop is a fantastic choice. They are simple to clean, durable, weatherproof, and, crucially, won’t harbour red mites like some wooden alternatives. Omlet’s Eglu coops are known for their twin-insulated walls, which keep hens warm during winter and cool in summer, offering superior climate control compared to most wooden builds. They are made from heavy-duty, long-lasting plastic that will never rot. The ease of pulling out the droppings tray in an Eglu for quick disposal is a huge time saver.

A secure run is just as important as the coop itself. Omlet’s runs feature anti-tunnel skirts—a flat piece of wire mesh that lies on the ground around the perimeter—to prevent foxes from digging in, and they use strong steel mesh, not flimsy chicken wire, for the walls. Their Walk In Chicken Runs provide full protection with sturdy roof panels, ensuring safety from aerial predators like hawks and keeping the interior dry. They are also modular and extendable, allowing you to add more space as your flock grows, providing vital room for scratching and foraging.

2. Security and Peace of Mind:
For an additional layer of convenience and security, consider an Omlet Automatic Chicken Coop Door. This mechanism saves you from having to rush out at dawn and dusk every day. The door opens horizontally—a design that is extremely difficult for prying paws to manipulate—securing your hens safely inside their coop each night and giving you peace of mind. It can be set to open and close based on a specific time or automatically via a light sensor.

3. Feeding and Watering Solutions:
A fully grown chicken will eat around 120 grams of layer pellets daily. To minimise waste and keep the run clean, use a no-spill chicken feeder. Omlet offers accessories like the Smart Feeder and No Waste Feeder, designed to prevent your hens from flicking food onto the ground where it can attract rodents.

Chickens drink a surprising amount of water, so a plentiful supply of fresh, clean water is essential for egg production and health. An insulated drinker, such as Omlet’s best-selling Insulated Drinker, helps to keep water at the right temperature year-round, preventing freezing in winter and keeping it refreshingly cool in summer. For smaller setups, Omlet recently launched a new 5.5L Chicken Drinker, perfect for a modest flock.

4. Accessories and Enrichment:
To keep your flock happy and entertained, customising their run and shed with enrichment items is vital. Bored chickens can become destructive. Chickens love to roost and feel safe when elevated, so install sturdy perches at different heights. Peck toys, which slowly release treats, are another great way to keep them occupied and the run tidy. Don’t forget that dust bathing is essential for controlling parasites; a simple wooden box filled with dry soil, sand, and wood ash in a corner of the shed or run will become their favourite spa. They need grit for digestion and oyster shell (or crushed eggshells) for strong, healthy eggshells.

The Symbiotic Garden: Chickens as Your Employees

Integrating your chickens into your garden routine provides immense benefits that go far beyond fresh eggs. The relationship between gardener and hen can be highly symbiotic, turning your flock into productive members of your garden management team.

1. Natural Tilling and Weeding:
Forget the garden rake—release the chickens! Their long toes and talons are perfect for ripping apart debris, tilling the soil, and aerating organic matter. When given a pile of mulch or compost, they will immediately spread it out evenly across the ground while searching for delicious insects, slugs, and earthworms.

Chickens are also excellent natural weeders. They love eating plants in their initial stages of sprouting, specifically targeting small seedlings and young weeds. Running your flock through garden beds in early spring as annual weeds begin to break dormancy can save you a significant amount of time spent hoeing and pulling weeds manually. They will also eagerly devour troublesome pests like cabbage loopers and snails, offering chemical-free pest control.

2. Pest Control and Fertiliser:
A small flock of hens can decimate populations of common garden pests like ants, spiders, and snails simply by naturally foraging and pecking as they roam. Furthermore, their droppings provide manure that, when composted and broken down properly, acts as a brilliant, nitrogen-rich fertiliser for your garden beds. Their constant scratching and eating of weeds and pests contributes to a healthier soil ecosystem.

3. Garden Management and Protection:
While chickens are helpful, they won’t discriminate between a weed and a prize-winning cabbage! It’s a good idea to supervise your flock and move them around the garden to give areas of the lawn or soil a breather. A mobile chicken coop, such as an Omlet Eglu on wheels, can be used as a chicken tractor, allowing you to strategically confine them to a specific patch for a few days to target grass removal, weeding, and fertilising in that zone without destroying your prize flowerbeds.

To protect sensitive areas, you can divide your garden into gated sections, or use temporary, lightweight chicken fencing or expandable trellis to section off prized crops and raised beds. Raised garden beds or hoops with netting are also effective physical barriers to keep hungry chickens from nibbling your vegetables. For your hens, consider growing ‘extra’ treats like speedy salads, microgreens, radish leaves, chard, or sunflowers (they love pecking out the seeds) to provide them with safe foraging options.

Daily and Monthly Care Routine

Caring for your backyard chickens involves a simple routine that ensures their health and happiness:

• Morning: Open the coop door (or let the Automatic Door do the job), check for fresh eggs, and make sure their feeder is full of quality layer pellets and their drinker has fresh, clean water. If the weather is extremely hot or cold, check the water twice daily.
• Daily Management: Reposition the run cover or shade to protect your flock from the sun, wind, or rain. Observe them for a few minutes each day—chickens are great at hiding illness, so knowing their normal behaviour is key to spotting problems early. Make sure they have access to their dust bath.
• Dusk: Your chickens will instinctively potter back into their coop to roost as dusk falls. Closing the door (manually or with an automatic door) ensures they have a secure night free from foxes.

Cleaning and Maintenance:

Regular cleaning is key to keeping your chickens healthy and their environment pleasant.

• Spot Cleaning (Several times a week): The droppings tray should be emptied every 2 to 4 days, depending on the size of your flock. This is the simplest task with a slide-out tray design like the Omlet Eglu. Spot clean the nesting area and brush off the roosting bars at least once a week to remove any sticky droppings.
• Deep Cleaning (Monthly): Conduct a thorough clean once a month, which involves scrubbing and wiping down every surface of the coop. Use a chicken-safe disinfectant or a natural solution like white vinegar and water. Plastic coops are particularly attractive for this reason, as they dry off much quicker than traditional wooden ones, reducing the time they are exposed to moisture.

Keeping chickens in your garden is a rewarding venture that transforms your outdoor space into a busy, productive micro-farm. With your robust garden shed providing custom shelter and secure, easy-to-clean equipment from Omlet, you’re set up for success and a steady supply of fresh, organic eggs. Embrace the companionship, enjoy the eggs, and watch your shed become the bustling hub of your garden!

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