Why we started hatching our own chickens?

We started hatching our own chickens when we realised that the price of chickens was massively going up and we didn’t want to spend too much on expanding our flock. Although we had initially invested in 5 pullets and paid about £15 per bird, we felt that even that was too much when we added in feed costs and the fact we had already lost bird due to ill health.

In our second year of keeping backyard chickens, we started looking online and realised people were getting very creative with hatching their own eggs, even in homemade incubators. At that stage, we felt building our own was a step too far- so we spent about £60 on a basic incubator from eBay (new) and decided to try our luck.

Although we were tempted to order rather expensive pure breed hatching eggs, I’m so glad we didn’t. The success rate with hatching your own eggs is so variable- in some batches we have had only one chick, and in others we had about 11 (out of the maximum 21 eggs we can fit into our incubator). Paying more than £1-2 per egg just makes this an expensive enterprise, and pure buff orpington hatching eggs are still selling on eBay for about £4 per egg…

We’re very lucky to have connected with a local smallholder who keeps a range of chicken breeds and has supplied us with eggs (and chicks when we only managed to hatch one chick and it was lonely) for £0.50 per egg!

We have hatched about 6 new hens in the last two years- which might not sound like a lot but we also hatched quite a few more cockerels, who became very tasty roast chickens.

These hens have been a mix of buff orpingtons, barred rocks and some very funny looking mixes who ended up laying blue eggs! It’s great fun not quite knowing how the bird will turn out and they all have their own personalities.

We are about to hatch our first batch of 2024 and would encourage anyone to try it too- even if this is your first year keeping chickens.

You can often find someone who might lend you an incubator, eggs don’t have to be expensive and you can keep the chickens in a cardboard box (lid open of course) or an old dog crate with a cheap heat lamp.

We do this until they are about 6 weeks old- but sometimes we build them a makeshift enclosure outside so they don’t smell and only come indoors to sleep.

We will keep you updated with how the chicken hatching goes this year and do drop us a comment below with any questions.