Before you buy chicks, remember to have some good chicken houses available for them. Once you do, you’re all set to pick them up. If you start out early in the spring, you can take a trip out to your nearest farm supply store and pick up a few baby chicks.

You can find an enormous variety of breeds through mail order catalogs, but chicks must be shipped in a fairly large quantity so they can keep each other warm. That works fine for the small farm flock, where 20 or 30 new chicks make sense – but if you can only have three, what will you do with all the extras?

Many people prefer not to raise too many (or any) male chicks, because they grow up to be roosters and cause havoc in chicken coop. Therefore, you may want to think about how many chicks of each sex you wish to raise. Most male and female chicks are indistinguishable, except by a chick-sexing expert. The experts aren’t always right either, so even if the feed store sells sexed chicks, you could still end up with a rooster. Most people who want a few chickens as pets won’t want to kill one of their pets once it grows old enough to sport the clear indications of maleness, no matter how mean your juvenile rooster might become.

Another alternative is to start in the summer and get three hens from a local farmer. You’ll enjoy the trip to the country, and you’ll be able to ask the farmer a few questions about chicken care. Some people get a bit carried away by creating architecturally designed chicken houses are extremely expensive. If you want to strut your stuff, go ahead, but the hens won’t be impressed. Anything that keeps them dry, safe and warm will work just fine.