Before you get free range chickens, read this

Everybody starts in the same place: someone sees a photograph of a hen standing in a sunny garden looking pleased with herself, and thinks well, how hard can it be?

Genuinely, it isn't hard. Chickens are one of the easiest animals you can keep. But there is a gap between "easy" and "no work at all", and almost everything in that gap is stuff nobody mentions until you're already standing in a garden centre holding a coop that's too small.

So here's the honest list. Not to put you off — we'd do it again tomorrow — but because the people who love keeping chickens are usually the ones who knew what they were signing up for.

Free range doesn't mean what you think it means

"Free range" conjures a hen wandering wherever she likes. What it means in practice is that your entire garden becomes chicken territory, and chickens are landscapers with strong opinions.

They will find your favourite flower bed within about four minutes. They dust-bathe by excavating a crater in the softest, most cultivated soil available, which is to say the bed you just planted. They eat seedlings with real enthusiasm. They will strip the bottom 40cm of a hedge bare.

None of this is naughtiness. Scratching and dust-bathing are hardwired behaviours, and a bird that can't do them is a stressed bird. You're not going to train it out of them. You have two realistic options:

• Give them the whole garden and accept the garden will change. Lawns become patchy. Borders need protecting or rehoming.
• Give them a generous run and let them out under supervision for an hour in the evening, which is what most people settle into.

The second is not a betrayal of free range. An hour of genuinely free ranging while you potter about is worth more to a hen than all day in a bare enclosure.

You need more space than the coop says you do

Coop manufacturers are optimistic. A coop advertised for eight birds is usually comfortable for four.

As a rough working figure, aim for at least 1 square metre of run per bird, plus roughly 30cm of perch space each inside the house. More is better, always. Crowding is behind a startling proportion of chicken problems — feather pecking, bullying, and disease all get worse as space gets tighter.

Buy for the flock you'll have in two years, not the flock you're starting with. Nobody in the history of poultry keeping has ended up with fewer chickens than they planned.

Foxes are not a maybe

This is the one we'd most want a beginner to take seriously.

A fox will take an entire flock in a single visit, and often won't eat them. It is genuinely awful, and it happens to people who thought they had a while yet to sort the fencing out. Urban foxes are bold, they're active in daylight, and a garden fence is not an obstacle.

What actually works:

• Weldmesh, not chicken wire. Chicken wire keeps chickens in; it does not keep foxes out. A fox can tear through it and a mink or rat can go straight through the holes.
• Dig it in, or lay a skirt of mesh flat on the ground extending 30cm outward. Foxes dig at the base of a barrier, not two feet away from it.
• Cover the top of any permanent run. Foxes climb far better than people expect.
• Shut the pop hole every single night. An automatic door opener is around £80–150 and is the single best money you'll spend, because the one night you forget is the night it matters.

Bolts, not spinning latches. Foxes are dextrous and patient.

You have to register them, even if you have two

This one catches almost everybody out, because it changed recently.

In Great Britain, all bird keepers must register their birds with APHA — including if you only keep a couple of hens as pets. It used to only apply to flocks of 50 or more, and that's the old rule most websites still repeat. Registration is free, takes a few minutes online, and exists so you can be contacted quickly if avian influenza appears nearby.

Rules do get updated, and they differ slightly in Northern Ireland, so check the current position on gov.uk rather than taking our word for it.

Related: in an avian flu outbreak, a housing order can be declared, which legally requires you to keep birds under cover. It's worth knowing before you buy that there may be weeks where your free range flock is not free range, and having a plan — a covered run, a spare shed — makes those weeks far less stressful.

The daily reality

The everyday commitment is genuinely small. Roughly ten minutes in the morning to let them out, check water and top up feed; ten minutes in the evening to shut them in and count heads. Counting heads every night is not optional — it's how you find out something is wrong while you can still do something about it.

Then there's a bigger clean weekly-ish, depending on your setup and how wet the weather has been.

The part people underestimate is that it's every day. Chickens don't do bank holidays. You need someone who can cover you if you go away, and "someone" needs to be a person who will genuinely shut the door at dusk, not someone who means to.

Eggs: the honest version

You will get a lot of eggs, and they are wonderful. You will also get no eggs at all sometimes, which surprises people.

Hens lay well for their first two or three years and then taper off. They stop or slow right down during the autumn moult, when they look dreadful and put their energy into regrowing feathers, and they slow in winter because laying is triggered by day length. A hen might live eight years and lay properly for three of them.

This is the bit worth sitting with before you start: are you keeping chickens, or are you buying eggs? If it's the eggs you're after, the supermarket is cheaper and more reliable. If you want the birds — and the eggs are a bonus that happens to taste better than anything you can buy — you'll be very happy.

They are individuals, and that catches you out

Nobody warns you that you will become attached.

Chickens have distinct personalities that emerge within days. You get the bold one who investigates your shoelaces, the anxious one who shouts if she can't see the others, the one who has decided she lives on the windowsill now. They come running when they hear the back door. They learn your voice.

Which means the hard part of chicken keeping isn't the mucking out. It's that hens are prey animals with a talent for hiding illness until it's advanced, and sometimes you'll lose one with very little warning. Some of them go to a vet and cost you £90 to be told there's nothing to be done. That's part of the deal, and it's the part worth being honest with yourself — and with any children — about beforehand.

So should you?

If you have the space, secure fencing, someone to cover you when you're away, and you want the birds rather than just the breakfast — yes. Wholeheartedly.

They're funny, they're calming, they turn kitchen scraps and garden pests into breakfast, and there is something genuinely lovely about a flock following you around the garden while you weed.

Just buy the bigger coop. Everyone wishes they'd bought the bigger coop.