One of the first things I did when we moved to this house in the summer of 2009 was to obtain some poulets from Craigslist (see The Girls Have Arrived!). I immediately put them in the backyard coop...
Without the benefit much information or any experience. The coop stayed dry, and the chickens were happy enough to start laying their first eggs in October.
They handled our mild winter like champs, but by the next summer my Free Range policy cause one chicken to almost die of heatstroke, and their feed started attracting rodents to the storage shed. Ewww.
I was proud to be an urban farmer, and I treated the chickens like pets. Sadly, they kept dying off until I was left with only one. I knew that she needed friends, so I returned the Craigslist karma and gave her away to someone who wanted a pet, not a Sunday dinner.
Thus, even though we've moved back to the Chicken Coop House, and I'm well past due for a new generation of chickens (and I even promised my daughter we'd get chickens), I've waited to take any action. It turns out, though, that I was waiting for the right person to come along and tell me what to do better. Her name is Kathy Shea Mormino, or the Chicken Chick, and I found her book at our local library: The Chicken Chick's Guide to Backyard Chickens.
Here are some concrete steps that I can take to follow Kathy's advice:
1) Dig a new floor. Kathy specifically mentions putting down a layer of either washed construction-grade sand or river sand (not sandbox sand). Previously, I just had a dirt floor. I've already started shoveling down to about six inches so that I can reuse the rich, dark manure and pine needles in a nearby kitchen garden (not actually built yet, but next in my plans). The sand is supposed to make poop scooping a lot easier (like scooping a litter box), while keeping it cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter (there's a pic below of the coop back in 2009 with a straw layer on top of the dirt floor - I'll be avoiding straw this time around as well).
2) Reinforce the walls with 1/4- or 1/2-inch hardware cloth. Chicken wire is apparently only good for chickens - predators (like our neighbor's wild kitten population) are not deterred by it. Since we've been gone, the chicken wire has started to pull away from the frame and there are huge gaps around the bottom of the coop. Kathy suggests using zip ties to connect the pieces of hardware cloth, which seems more DIY-friendly than welding.
3) Place nest boxes below the roosts. I don't think I even used roosts at all - the chickens just climbed back into their nest box (see vertical, wooden structure in above photo). That's not a problem, unless you want to actually eat the eggs. Chickens poop at night while in their roosts, which results in poop-covered eggs if they sleep in the next boxes. So, I'm thinking of cutting out the chicken wire from that side, and replacing the vertical nest boxes with a whole-new coop addition. This single change would cause a positive cascade of changes: the old coop could become a covered run, so that I don't have to give the chicken's Free Range time, I would be able to access the eggs without opening the coop door and letting the chickens out, the chickens could sleep on raised roosts which would keep their nesting boxes clean, and the new coop would provide a warmer (or shaded) spot to hang out (since the previous coop almost had too much ventilation without much shelter).
4) Replace the automatic waterer with a nipple drinker (teehee). This means checking water every day, and having the water possibly freeze in January, but it keeps the poop out of the water.
5) Replace the mason-jar feeder with a treadle feeder. I like the Rent-a-Coop one, because it's cheaper and has a plastic base, which seems less likely to burn my chickie's footsies in the hot summer time. This should deter rodents from staking out a residence in the coop. Kathy also is really anti-treat. I was feeding my chickens scratch every day, but she says that it should be reserved for only really cold nights (in order to give an energy boost). I didn't realize that treats make chickens fat, and a fat chicken is more likely to over-heat.
That's about a $200 investment before I even get the chickens (with an addition $400 budgeted for a new coop from our local feed store) - with about $50 per month for feed and oyster shells. So, chickens are not cheap pets. However, keeping the promise to my little girl - priceless.
They handled our mild winter like champs, but by the next summer my Free Range policy cause one chicken to almost die of heatstroke, and their feed started attracting rodents to the storage shed. Ewww.
I was proud to be an urban farmer, and I treated the chickens like pets. Sadly, they kept dying off until I was left with only one. I knew that she needed friends, so I returned the Craigslist karma and gave her away to someone who wanted a pet, not a Sunday dinner.
Thus, even though we've moved back to the Chicken Coop House, and I'm well past due for a new generation of chickens (and I even promised my daughter we'd get chickens), I've waited to take any action. It turns out, though, that I was waiting for the right person to come along and tell me what to do better. Her name is Kathy Shea Mormino, or the Chicken Chick, and I found her book at our local library: The Chicken Chick's Guide to Backyard Chickens.
Here are some concrete steps that I can take to follow Kathy's advice:
1) Dig a new floor. Kathy specifically mentions putting down a layer of either washed construction-grade sand or river sand (not sandbox sand). Previously, I just had a dirt floor. I've already started shoveling down to about six inches so that I can reuse the rich, dark manure and pine needles in a nearby kitchen garden (not actually built yet, but next in my plans). The sand is supposed to make poop scooping a lot easier (like scooping a litter box), while keeping it cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter (there's a pic below of the coop back in 2009 with a straw layer on top of the dirt floor - I'll be avoiding straw this time around as well).
2) Reinforce the walls with 1/4- or 1/2-inch hardware cloth. Chicken wire is apparently only good for chickens - predators (like our neighbor's wild kitten population) are not deterred by it. Since we've been gone, the chicken wire has started to pull away from the frame and there are huge gaps around the bottom of the coop. Kathy suggests using zip ties to connect the pieces of hardware cloth, which seems more DIY-friendly than welding.
3) Place nest boxes below the roosts. I don't think I even used roosts at all - the chickens just climbed back into their nest box (see vertical, wooden structure in above photo). That's not a problem, unless you want to actually eat the eggs. Chickens poop at night while in their roosts, which results in poop-covered eggs if they sleep in the next boxes. So, I'm thinking of cutting out the chicken wire from that side, and replacing the vertical nest boxes with a whole-new coop addition. This single change would cause a positive cascade of changes: the old coop could become a covered run, so that I don't have to give the chicken's Free Range time, I would be able to access the eggs without opening the coop door and letting the chickens out, the chickens could sleep on raised roosts which would keep their nesting boxes clean, and the new coop would provide a warmer (or shaded) spot to hang out (since the previous coop almost had too much ventilation without much shelter).
4) Replace the automatic waterer with a nipple drinker (teehee). This means checking water every day, and having the water possibly freeze in January, but it keeps the poop out of the water.
5) Replace the mason-jar feeder with a treadle feeder. I like the Rent-a-Coop one, because it's cheaper and has a plastic base, which seems less likely to burn my chickie's footsies in the hot summer time. This should deter rodents from staking out a residence in the coop. Kathy also is really anti-treat. I was feeding my chickens scratch every day, but she says that it should be reserved for only really cold nights (in order to give an energy boost). I didn't realize that treats make chickens fat, and a fat chicken is more likely to over-heat.
That's about a $200 investment before I even get the chickens (with an addition $400 budgeted for a new coop from our local feed store) - with about $50 per month for feed and oyster shells. So, chickens are not cheap pets. However, keeping the promise to my little girl - priceless.
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