What are the Best Egg Laying Chicken for Beginners? With the bird flu and the price of eggs in the news on a daily basis, it seems that keeping chickens is at the top of everyone’s mind. Well, I’m a beginner chicken farmer myself, and I’ve got to say that for the breeds I’ve selected, so far it has not been too much time and effort. (Update: Cleaning poop takes some time, but gets easier when you move them outside to a coop) I bought 7 egg laying hen chicks from Meyer hatchery and 1 rooster, and also got their free meal maker egg laying hen, but I did not want the free rooster. We didn’t take the rooster because we wanted to select our own rooster – a Swedish Flower Hen rooster.
I felt that if I had let the hatchery give me a random breed of rooster that there could be an issue with temperament. Most egg laying hen breeds are mild mannered, but the roosters of many breeds can be ill-tempered and I thought since I’m a beginner chicken farmer, a known mild-mannered rooster breed would make the most sense for me.
The Egg Laying Chicken Breeds I Selected
So, this is what I got:
1 Swedish Flower Rooster (Male) – A mild mannered rooster and the potential to breed more Swedish Flower Hen Chicks and crosses. The main issue is that this guy cost $20, while most other roosters are in the $3 to $5 range (or free).
1 Swedish Flower Hen (female) – They are good egg laying hens, and they will even lay eggs during the cold winter months., unlike many other breeds of egg laying chickens. Again, this breed is just expensive – it was $30 for one chick!
1 Wheaten Marans and 2 Cuckoo Marans chicks – The Marans breed is a very friendly French breed of egg laying chicken and the main difference between these two type of Marans is just the coloring and the price. It was $16 for the wheaten and $6 for each of the Cuckoo.
3 Easter Egger chicks – Pretty much everyone likes Easter Eggers because of their beautiful eggs that range in color from pale blue to green. Coupled with their friendliness and relative inexpensiveness )($4.50 per chick), they’re definitely a good chicken for beginners.
And lastly I got an unknown breed as the free meal maker chick.
Raising Egg Laying Hens Has Its Moments
So far, the experience of raising chicks as a beginner (I’m not the Neighborhood Chicken Guy…yet) has been good, with a few caveats.
Frist of all, we ended up having 2 chicks pass away on the first and third days. One was the meal maker chick, which seemed smaller and less energetic than the other chicks from the get go. She also did not take to eating and drinking, even though I hand fed and cuddled her for hours. I woke up in the morning to find that she had passed away. The second chick was an Easter Egger that didn’t seem to grow at the same rate as the other chicks. She didn’t have pasty butt (a common occurrence of the vent/cloaca/butthole being blocked by poop), so I’m not sure why she stayed small and passed away.
Secondly, there’s a lot of poop. Though 7 chickens make a lot less poop than a human baby. Instead of changing diapers, you’re going to change food and water bowls that have been pooped in, the straw and newspaper bedding that’s been pooped on, and you need to clean the poop off of chicken butts, feet, and feathers.