The outlaws have escaped

Yep, the girls have left the garage. FINALLY. They didn't stink, (Yes mom, you could smell them a bit, but if you've ever been around a dirty hen house, you know they didn't stink.) but they did take up a good portion of the garage, and since we've gotten rid of our SUV and gotten our Ford focus we'd like to keep it nice and have it garaged especially in the heat of summer that's just around the bend. Anyway, I took the opportunity that I had with a good weather weekend with no plans (finally) to get them moved out to their new home.

They seem to like it there too. They are directly over the spot where my winter compost pile had been for the last almost 8 months and have had their heads in the dirt, presumably finding tons of worms, for the last couple of days. We're really happy with the way everything turned out. I've decided that I am going to leave the coop parked here for the next five to six months and practice the deep mulching method that I have been using so far. I hope to next year be able to use this area as a new planting bed, and begin a series of crop rotations with the birds. Does anyone have any experience with rotating chickens throughout their gardens? Anything I should take into consideration? Worse case scenario, I'll just collect the mulch and compost it at the end of the season.

Till tomorrow.

P~

A thousand words.

It's been said that a picture's worth a thousand words, so I'll keep mine to a minimum. Let's just say... it's done, finally, it's done.

Here it is, before and after putting the birds into it. They were a little unsure about what to do with all of the space, but a couple of them spread their wings and fluffed their feathers like they haven't been able to in the old box.

Above: The kids exploring their new digs. They haven't really figured out what to do with the ramp up into the hen house yet, but I gave them a little clue later.

This is the back of the hen-house where the nesting boxes are located. I made two side by side. I'm not sure yet whether I'm going to need to separate the two nests, but as for right now I have them open to each other.

This is the back of the hen-house, just below the nesting box. It's the area that was designed to be able to be pulled out for cleaning as well as for increased ventilation. I'm leaving it in for a couple of days, at least until the birds get used to walking on the wire.

Speaking of the wire floor. In the picture above you can see that half of the floor is covered with 1/2 inch hardware wire cloth. Actually it's all covered, but I have a piece of wood in there to get them used to it slowly. There's also two roosting bars. One of them is about 4 inches in front of the nests to try to encourage the hens to not roost on the nests, but on the bars instead. This should limit the amount of manure in the nests, and on the eggs in the future.

I told you I gave them a little clue later on. I helped a couple of them onto the ramp, and a couple came down on their own.


A couple of them just decided to hang out on the roosting bars. Here you can see the configuration of the two roosting bars.

Hope you all like! We are very happy with it. I will be adding the ability to put some old bike tires onto the heavy side of the coop so that I can pick up and move them if I want to. This should after all be more or less a very large chicken tractor. A~ is very pleased as well, and has said that she will let it go in the yard. :) Tonight was the vote at the planning commission too, perfect timing, so we'll see if it was able to go on to the next level or not. (fingers crossed.) I'll let you all know tomorrow.
P~

Goings on.

You might have noticed the postings being a little thin around here. That's not because I haven't been doing anything, but quite the contrary. As I said earlier in the week the weekend was a busy one, and it hasn't slowed. I've been able to get a little work done each night on the chicken coop. It'll be a Cadillac of a coop when I'm done I think, a "Coop de ville" so to speak. So far I have finished the basic framing and completed the Nesting box addition to the end of the enclosure.
You can see that I made the coop to have the main hen house well off the ground. I plan to use the same basic method that I outlined in "Small-Scale Coop Care" to build a deep mulch in the bottom of the coop by slowly adding carbonaceous material (straw or sawdust) on top of each layer of manure and will slowly build up the depth of the base of the coop with a rich compost base. Having the hen house well off the ground will allow me to "uppen" the level of the floor and still give the birds enough room to mill about comfortably.
Here's what the nesting box looks like so far. I'm only making it a two birder, because I don't want to encourage bedding in them, only nesting for egg laying. The missing top to the box when finished will be able to be opened from outside to retrieve the eggs. I will be putting a roosting pole across the front of the box, and another in the center of the house and higher up. You may be able to see the metal brackets on the horizontal posts. These are there to allow me to use a removable tray for manure collection. The object of this is to work with the 1/2 inch wire mesh floor that I will be using (at least on half of the floor.) to allow me to close off the bottom in the winter to keep the warmth in while still having ease of cleaning. In the summer here it can get over 100 F regularly so this will allow me to remove the closed floor entirely in order to allow ventilation and breezes and will let the droppings fall to the deep mulch below.
Here is another view with the nesting box on the back wall where you can see fairly well the layout of the whole coop. The little square in the near wall will be the entrance, and the wall just to the left of it will be a large door that I'll be able to open for maintenance/cleaning. I should be able to get this done by the end of the weekend,if not sooner, then it'll be decorating time. I mean, if it's gonna be in A~'s yard it's gotta be relatively pretty right?

Hope you're all having a great week. Till tomorrow.
P~

Ooops, I did it again.

Yep, we got more birds.

It wasn't really as spontaneous as it sounds though. The ordinance that I have been pushing for, and that I am still imminently confident will pass (hopefully this month!) will allow us to keep up to 5 hens. Although we currently have 7, only three of those are confirmed pullets. The other four should be males; I am still questioning whether or not that's the case though, there's a couple that just look "feminine" for lack of a better description. So anyway, we've been planning on going to the local farm store today for their advertised "Chick Day" and I'm glad we did. It was absolute mayhem there this afternoon, I can only imagine a Saturday afternoon.

The new chicks are Brown Leghorns, and will grow up to be very nice additions to the others. I currently have them in the basement, in the same type of box brooder that I used for the older chickens that we have. Speaking of which, this weekend I'll be re-purposing some discarded 2x4's into a new home for the chooks. They need a bigger feeder, and more room to... sorry for this... "spread their wings". Watch for a post on the building of it later this weekend.

As far as my other plans, there's prepping and planting potatoes, planting second beets, and prepping the other beds for future planting, weather permitting. I hope you all are expecting better weather than we are. I love the rain and the gloom, but it kills us when it always comes on Sat-Sun. Geez! Some people have to work all week you know?

Have a great weekend all.

P~

Small-Scale Coop-Care

I've been reading this book, "Chicken Tractor: The permaculture guide to happy hens and healthy soil.", a little here and a little there, over the last couple of weeks. One of the concepts that I've picked up from it I've been using on a modified, smaller scale in the "Cardboard Chicken Condo"; the "Deep Mulch" technique. This method was conveyed in the book as a way of building garden beds through a deep mulching of one area with successive layers of manure and straw leaving, after some weeks, a deep mattress of well mixed compost with a solid ratio of nitrogen to carbon. (The essential elements of any good compost pile.)I've tweaked the idea a little to suit my needs, and have been very pleased with it.

Basically, what I've been doing, is rather than having to clean out my small temporary coop every couple of days, I started with a thin (approx 1") layer of sawdust. This was covered by a pretty consistent layer of manure within a couple of days, the time when I would have had to clean the coop. I know it's a bit gross, but the picture to the right was taken this afternoon, while the birds were on the other end of the coop feeding, and illustrates what I'm talking about. It's at this time that I take the opportunity to apply a layer to the deep mulch.

What I do is, rather than remove and replace the sawdust, I just add a thin layer over the top of it. It really doesn't need to be heavy, in fact I've found that thinner is better. If I put the new layer on too thick, it really doesn't make it any better, and all that does is fill up the coop faster, negating my effort at reducing the frequency of cleanings. Better to add a thin layer once a day that to try to go a few days with a thicker one, it just doesn't mix together as well. A thin cover of the saw dust is very effective at keeping down any odor, and the birds are happy with it. They will immediately begin to lay around on the sawdust, something they don't do when it's covered with manure. The birds also have a natural tendency to scratch around in the mulch which mixes it up, further incorporating the two elements and keeping the smell down.

The one other thing that I do when maintaining the coop is to break up the mulch before adding a new layer. After the mulch gets a couple of inches thick, I find that the birds have scratched it up into corners or mounds and have compacted the rest to a certain degree. I break this up and redistribute it evenly around the coop before adding the thin layer of new dust.

Now what I'm left with, is a well mixed bed of sawdust and manure that is just begging to go in the compost pile. Some of this I'll be experimenting with trying to make a high nitrogen, dilutable, manure tea for the lawn. ( I'll be testing it in a small area before doing the whole lawn.) I'll let you know when that experiment begins.

Hope this tidbit helps with some of you aspiring small scale urban chicken keepers.

P~