urban cicken flocks

[faithsstuff]

My family in Atlanta, in the city and we are thinking of getting a small flock of chickens for eggs. Does anyone else do this? I have a few questions that I'd love answered.
1)can you leave them for a weekend?
2)are they really smell free?
3)how often do they get illness and if so can you just take them to a vet?

there are alot of online resources and they make this look pretty easy. in your opinion, are they really easy to keep?

thanks!

[Defenestrator]

You couldn't leave my chickens for a weekend because their water runs out by the end of the day and if I didn't put them in their coop at night the raccoons would eat them all. However, once we got our chickens, lots of chicken-lovers came out of the woodwork and we have lots of chicken-sitters available if we need them. Their twice-daily care takes less than 5 minutes.

My chicken coop and yard don't smell. I use the deep litter method in the coop and in the summer I turn the soil under in the yard about once every two weeks, then add fresh straw. In the winter, fresh straw only. If it rains and I have not put straw down in a while it will have a slight odor but after maintenance or when it is dry, there isn't anything.

[Defenestrator]

As far as the vet goes, we took one chicken in for stitches after a raccoon attack. Our chickens have also gotten mites from visiting chickens and we treated those on our own.

[northwoods1995]

I agree with what Defenestrator wrote about the smell and the ease of care.

We have chicken sitters if we go away too.

(Knock on wood) None of our chickens have had any health problems. We hatched 6 from eggs 1 1/2 years ago.

I think they are easy and they are a lot of fun. The eggs are nice too!

[redvlagrl]

When I had a flock of 5 in urban Australia I could leave on friday evening and come home on sunday and they would be ok. We had a large water hopper or two. The food would last as well (I would give an extra feed before I left and make sure the hopper was full).

If I was going away for longer I woudl got someone to come and feed/water them. It wsn't too hard to find someone because that person gets your wonderful eggs.

We lost one but we treated them more with a 'farm' mentality than 'pet'. i.e. though we loved them we wouldn't spend hundreds trying to save one. Nor would we let one suffer. I didn't have to kill our one that died but I did have to kill a couple of pigeons that got into the coop and were seriously injured by the chooks.