Fresh eggs every morning. You can’t beat them - especially not if you plucked them from under the chicken yourself.

Once you’ve checked with your local environmental health authority for any regulations that would forbid you from keeping poultry in your residential area, and re-read the deeds of your home for the same, it’s time to start deciding what to buy and where from.

Here’s Blagger’s ‘Friday Five’ rundown of the first sites you should turn to on the road to egg and meat self-sufficiency.

SOME HENS The Battery Hen Welfare Trust (BHWT) re-homes former battery hens once they have come to the end of their productive lives. Most battery hens are slaughtered when they are less than a year old, as their rates of laying drop fractionally. They’re then made into pet food.

The Trust rescues these hens and works to re-house them with at-home farmers who want a pair or more for their garden. The hens should still be highly productive, although they may be missing a small part of their beaks, which could have been snipped off by the farmer to stop them from pecking each other. There are Trust sites around the country, allowing you to do a good deed for local abused birds wherever you live.

If you’re still not convinced that you should rescue a hen, then check out the Trust’s Gallery of Spoilt Hens to see how friendly, sociable and happy they can be in the right environment.

HEN DIRECTORY If you’d rather buy your flock brand new, then check out the extensive list of breeds at Omlet. Very few sites give both pictures and characteristic of the most common breeds, yet this extensive egg-cyclopedia does both, with aplomb. If you need to match your hens to your hydrangea, or your bantams to your bougenvelia, this makes it about as easy as picking from the Argos catalogue.

Sadly Omlet won’t deliver livestock to anywhere more than two hours’ drive from its base in Oxford, so check here, and then buy elsewhere if you don’t fall within its catchment area.

HOMES FOR HENS We’re sticking with Omlet for our third recommendation, proving that this supplier really is the home farmer’s best choice for getting started with chickens.

You probably shouldn’t be building your own chicken run. It’ll save money, but it certainly won’t save time, and unless you get it right you’re going to end up with damp, unhappy and possibly unwell birds. The easy alternative is Omlet’s funky Eglus. These easily-maintained, easily-cleaned, double-skinned homes are ideal for between two and ten hens (depending which one you buy). They’re built with the busy owner in mind, with quick-access doors for retrieving eggs and topping up the food, and the whole thing can be easily dismantled and hosed down for hygiene.

Best of all, they come with a unique anti-fox skirt that should keep your feathery ladies safe from the nightly neighbourhood prowler. They’ve got so much confidence it will keep your flock safe that they’ve even given it a guarantee.

And, as the Eglu is plastic and metal rather than live animals, Omlet will even deliver it beyond it two-hour cut-off.

CHICKEN FEED Chickens love offcuts from your kitchen vegetable prep (and they’ll ransack your plot if you let them roam free) but you shouldn’t feed them on veg alone. They need a carefully-balanced diet including grit, pellets and corn. Fortunately it’s not expensive to kit out your chicken larder, and so you should look at getting in a supply of food before buying your birds.

Suppliers like Flyte So Fancy and G J W Titmuss supply poultry feed at excellent prices. Flyte is selling 20kg bags of Organic Mixed Corn for poultry for £10.95 - a mix that it claims will ‘provide the vitamins and minerals needed in a balanced diet’. Titmuss sells the same quantity of Small Holder Free Range Layers Meal for £6.95.

HEALTHY HENS Chickens can get sick, just like the rest of us, so being on good terms with your local vet is a must. However, a lot of problems can often be sorted at home, which is where the net can help.

The Urban Chicken wiki has pages on common ailments that can afflict your flock, including lice, worms, and impacted or watery crop. It gives some simple suggestions for diagnosing and remedying problems, but even if it doesn’t put your hens back on the road to rude health, it is at least a good starting point, allowing you to talk to your vet with some authority.

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Inclusion in this list should not be construed as recommendation.