This book explains everything for beginner chicken-keepers! Even though I knew some of the information, much of it was new to me (so now I'm well-prepared if and when I get to keep chickens)!

Chickens in Your Backyard is all anyone needs to know to raise chickens!

Chickens in Your Backyard is newly revised and updated. It includes how to set up a coop, a run and a home for your new chickens. There are chapters on feed, eggs, water, cleaning, disease, breeding and incubation. Showing and butchering chickens are also covered. The book concludes with the pros and cons of starting your flock with eggs, chicks, young or mature chickens. Along the way, the author provides lists of breeds for different goals (friendliest, best layers, biggest breasts).

I love the tips in Chickens in Your Backyard. They obviously come from a someone with a true love of all things chicken. Here are some examples:
• Spring is the best time to purchase chicks and begin your chicken experience. However, young and mature chicken prices are much lower in the fall.
• Chicken cannibalism is catching!
• Egg sexing is a myth.
• Butchering chickens one day can lead to becoming vegetarian the next.

As a city girl, raising chickens seems like a good way to go back to my family’s midwestern roots. Chickens are allowed where I live. I hear a rooster or two each morning. I didn’t think about how hard it would be to protect them from hawks and heat where I live in the High Desert. Maybe when I retire and have more free time, I’ll get a few bantams. When I do, I’ll be sure to have this book by my side. 5 stars!

Thanks to the publisher, Rodale Books, and NetGalley for an advanced copy.

If you have been keeping hens for a while, this would all be information you already know from experience, although there were a few bits about hatching chickens in an incubator, which I didn't know, as well as how to kill a chicken and pluck it, but then, that is not why I have chickens, so that would make sense. And all the eggs that have hatched have been done by my hens.

But, for a new owner of hens, or someone thinking of getting hens, this could save your life, and that of your hens.

The author likes to poke fun, at mistakes new owners have made, to make a point. She tells the story of the man who left his coop open once, and didn't lose any hens, over night, so figured he could do it forever. A week later, predators had eaten all his hens. Or the story she tells of a man who said the milk had dried up on his hen, and she wasn't feeding her chicks, and what was he supposed to do. Hint, hens are not mammals.

Good solid, practical information. More a reference book, then a read cover to cover kind of book, though I did.

Thanks to Netgalley for making this book available for an honest review.

I'm so glad I read this book. We decided to raise chickens and I was looking for a good reference book....and this is a very good reference book. All my questions were answered plus I got info I didn't know I needed. Everyone who is thinking about starting a chicken coop should read this book.