You can’t get chickens before you’ve bought them some food and supplies. But before you get your chickens you don’t really know what they eat, and talk of mash, pellets, grit, spice and vinegar, can be somewhat boggling.

Fortunately the breeder from whom we bought our hens also kitted us out with everything they needed to eat and thrive, saving us a lot of head-scratching. So, in the absence of any no-nonsense guides to starting with chickens, here’s a shopping list for wannabe home-flock keepers.

The bulk of your chickens’ diet will be layers pellets or layers mash. This is a complete food, like the biscuits you can feed a cat, containing all of the nutrients they need to survive. The pellets are small, compacted rolls of their food, each one a little smaller than a Tic Tac. The mash, meanwhile, is a powder that you mix with water to form a kind of porridge. As you can imagine, pellets are by far the easiest to work with, as you can just full the feeder direct from the bag without any mixing up.

You should be paying about £1 per kilo for layers pellets or mash, and there seems to be no saving to be made by buying one in preference to the other. We’re using pellets.

You’ll want to keep your chickens happy, so add some poultry spice to their feed. Because they have no taste buds, they have no idea what the pellets or mash taste like, but they do have a good sense of smell and so will be tempted to eat more and stay healthy by the liquorice aroma of poultry spice.

Not only do they not have taste buds, but they also don’t have teeth, so they can’t break up their food in their mouths. Instead they swallow it whole into their crop, which is a cavity in their chest at the bottom of their neck. The crop is a mass of strong muscles used to grind the food with help of some small pieces of grit. You therefore need to give them a ready supply of grit, and can buy pieces broken down to the optimum size of around 3 – 5mm.

Hens are hard-working animals, popping out an average of six eggs a week once they get up to speed. Each egg has a shell, of course, which requires a great deal of calcium to make. This draws on their body’s natural resources and must be replenished, either by feeding them oyster shell or by baking the shells of used eggs to sterilise them, crushing them up and feeding them back to the hens. Be careful not to feed them too much calcium, though, and don’t start giving it to them until they are laying.

That’s the basics. Give them plenty of water and feed them what we’ve outlined above and you should have a happy, healthy little flock. You can also optionally give them some apple cider vinegar to keep their plumage healthy.

However, like the rest of us they do enjoy a treat. We feed ours a handful of corn every evening, and give them offcuts from our vegetables (you’re not allowed to do this if you’re planning on selling your eggs). They particularly enjoy the green feathery tops off the carrots that we pluck out of the vegetable plot, and when they see us walking across the garden with one in our hands they race around the edge of the run in an effort to get to the bars first and so enjoy the choice pickings.

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3. The chickens have a new favourite thing