Hire a Hen: Maritime business specializes in chicken coop and hen rentals

Get all the info on Hire a Hen, a company that rents everything you need to have a backyard chicken coop, including the chickens.

A Nova Scotia organization is offering a unique service to families wanting to dip their toes — or talons — into chicken keeping, without the full commitment.

Hire a Hen is a family-run business based in Springfield for those without a heated barn, or who don’t want to farm 12 months out of the year.

“Hire a Hen rents you a number of hens, two, three, as many as you want. You can get a package that will include a chicken coop, which is fortified against critters, so nobody can get in to hurt your chickens. You can get run that goes with it so your girls can get out and prance around and find bugs,” says longtime customer Steven Bruhm.

“Also, in your package, you receive a water and food dish, you receive a large bag of feed, certainly enough to get you going, some what they call bedding, which is shavings or straw, so your girls can bed down happily at night.”

Customers get the hens in the spring so they can be safely housed without a heating unit.

“And you get to keep them until, well, last year it was early November before they went back. It depends on how late the summer will hold, the weather will hold, but they are there with you until you are ready to send them back because it’s too cold,” Bruhm says.

Bruhm is retired English professor who moved back home to Nova Scotia after teaching at the University of Western Ontario.

“I grew up outside of Bridgewater, and when I was a kid we had chickens, we had hens, and so I was used to the idea, but then I grew up and went away. When I came back to retire, I saw on Facebook one of my old high school teachers was promoting Hire a Hen and I thought this sounds fascinating because it sounds like absolutely the right deal for me,” he says.

The first year, Bruhm had two hens and he’s had three ever since.

He is about to go into his fifth year of hiring hens and says nothing compares to having fresh eggs.

“We love it… when you go down to the coop in the morning and pick up an egg that’s still warm, because it just came out of her, and bring it up and crack it and put it in your frying pan, there is just nothing like that, nothing you get in the grocery store, where they’ve been around probably for a month, is going to come close to that taste experience,” he says. “It’s lovely.”

Bruhm adds his Portuguese water dog named Toby also loves the hens. When they go back to the farm for the winter, Toby will run to the coop every day to see if they finally came back.

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