Chicken Palace: Finishing Touches

I think I am happy with the final product that is the Chicken Palace.  Once the basic structure was up all I had to do was work on adding a couple of key features.  One of those features was the nest boxes.  Chickens need a nice protected area to lay their eggs so I build a row of boxes into the front wall of the chicken coop.  I made an access door on the back of the boxes so that I could gather eggs without having to go inside the coop.

These boxes are a step above their current set up which doesn't even keep straw from falling out.  I may have to build an angled roof above them to keep the chickens from roosting there, but I will see how things go without that in the beginning.

The next thing I installed were the roosting bars.  I was going to have them on just one side, but I would hate to waste the space that could be housing chickens so I made it even on both sides.  The roosting bars were just a couple of twelve foot 2x4's that were ripped in half lengthwise and set on top of the braces that stabilized the end walls.  I held them in place with screws and then added a couple of supports near the middle that would help them support the weight of the chickens that would be sleeping there at night.  The braces also act as a step that the chickens can use to get up to the roosting bars for the night.

The other addition was an old window from the camper that used to sit on this trailer.  I wanted a way to allow some more light and ventilation into the coop and this seemed to fit the bill.  The window isn't exactly functional but I can take it out of the frame as needed and I stapled a chicken wire screen across it for a little extra protection if I leave the window open.

On the outside the finishing touches were some flashing that my friend gave me to help close in the ends and keep out the rain (if we ever get any).  I did my best to fit it to each end though I will admit that it was an amateur job.  Still I think it is better than nothing and now I have a safe and secure place to house my chickens.

Over the door I put up a longer sheet of flashing to act as a little porch roof.  The idea is that it will keep the doorway drier if the rain really starts to come down.  It was a little difficult to work into the space but it does serve a purpose so I am happy it is there.

The final addition to the coop was a removable ramp for the chickens so they can get in and out of the coop easily.  The black metal bumper gets very hot in the sun and I didn't want the chickens to burn their feet every time they go in and out, so I made sure to attach the ramp to a little wooden porch.  I was going to make it fold up so that it could be permanently attached to the coop, but then I thought if I ever have to haul the coop, the ramp would be better off being removable, so I screwed the porch into a block of wood that fits snugly between the coop and the bumper and holds the ramp firmly in place.  If I ever want to move the coop I can just pull out the ramp and get rolling.

Now all that is left is to roll the coop to where I want it in the chicken yard and let the chickens move right in.  I couldn't have timed it better since I have a batch of chicks about to hatch any day now and the young chickens are old enough to get mixed into the main flock.  At some point this summer I will get the wooden ends painted to seal them in for winter.  I think I am going to go with a white blank slate and then add a mural a little at a time as I go along.  This chicken coop may just become a work of art.

Finding lots of Friends in the Garden

I have been doing more weeding in the past few days.  I hope to have the whole garden mulched in a couple more weeks.  I am focusing on one bed at a time and clearing the pathways as I work my way down the garden.  One of the beds that I cleared was the celery bed.  It was becoming dangerously thick with all kinds of weeds that were threatening to overtake the young celery plants.  As I plucked ragweed, plantains, wild geranium, clover, and various grasses from around the celery plants I came across a couple things that made me smile.  One of them was a handful of onion seedlings scattered throughout the bed.  I must have let some of my onions go to seed last year and they planted themselves just fine.

The other was a small multitude of earthworms I found lounging in my garden bed.  When I first turned the soil in the garden it was utterly devoid of life.  Over the past three years I have gradually built up the amount of organic matter in the soil.  Now it is healthy enough to support a diverse soil ecosystem.  I also saw all kinds of other insects moving around in the bed.  With that much activity I hope I will be seeing toads moving in by summer.

I came across even more "wildlife" when I was weeding the green bean bed.  It looks like I am housing a healthy population of earthworms, lady bugs, and spiders down at soil level.  With all the plant cover they had I was not surprised.

This was me making progress on the green bean bed.  The right side of the picture shows just how overgrown things were starting to be here, but after mercilessly pulling every green thing that was not a bean plant the whole bed took on a much more tidy appearance. Now that the weeds are getting under control, I will try to get everything mulched up so that those new friends of mine I found living among the weeds still have a safe place to call home.

Hatching Eggs: Round Two

I had planned on hatching a second batch of chicks this year and now that my flock has lost a couple more hens I feel inclined to hatch a few extra....just in case.  This round I am putting 20 eggs into the incubator.  My hatch rate tends to run about 50% so I expect to get around 10 chicks from this batch.  If I get more then it shouldn't be a big deal.  I only have two roosters from the last batch of chicks and I was hoping to get more for my freezer than that.  I also want to cull a few of the older hens.  I have some that have been pecking and eating eggs and I would really like that to stop.  I think I know who the main culprits are and those are the ones I will be needing to replace.

With my new chicken coop I will have room for about twenty to twenty-five hens.  I don't think that I need that many and unless they lay eggs all through winter, I don't really want to feed that many. My ideal flock size would be fifteen hens and one rooster.  That should provide me with enough eggs for me to eat and extra to sell to pay for their feed.  Right now my flock is down to seven laying hens and three pullets that should start laying in another month or so.  Six of the seven hens are going on three years old so bringing in younger hens should balance the productivity of my flock.

Chicken Palace Construction: Stage Two

I am super stoked about how things are coming along with my new and improved chicken coop AKA the Chicken Palace.  My friends were able to come and help me so we got walls and such put together in short order.

First was the end wall with the door.  We simply held the plywood up to the end of the structure and traced the shape of the hoop onto the wood.   Using a sawzall we cut the plywood sheets down to the proper shape. The end needed two sheets of plywood to fill it in completely so we stacked them on top of each other to fill it all out.  The bottom was secured with screws and then the top was held in place by drilling holes and wiring the wood down to the structure as well as using small scraps of wood to brace the separate sheets to each other.

The next step was bracing the wall with a couple of studs.  The studs would run from the floor to the arc of the curved roof on either side of what would become the main door.  This helped to stabilize the end wall and give a little more support to the structure of the hoop roof.  Once the studs were screwed into place I proceeded to cut the doors out of the wall.  I made a small door in the corner of the coop for the chickens and added a latch so that I could lock it up at night and a hook that would hold the door open during the day.  In the center I cut a me-sized door with an arc at the top to keep with the curved roof line theme.  The door will be a dutch door and I plan on making a window in the top to help ventilate the structure better.  I may add an RV window to this wall before I  am finished, but for now I am just going to stick with the doors on this end.

The other end went up in much the same way and once it was secure we went to work on covering the cattle panel hoop walls with corrugated metal roofing.  The roofing panels were held in place by screwing them into 12 foot lengths of 2x4's that were cut into halves and held against the inside of the hoop structure as purlins.

The purlins were then secured to the end walls with screws to add more rigidity to the structure.  Once the center purlin was screwed into place the entire structure lost any wobble that it had.  Now my chickens will have a strong safe place to call their home.  The gaps at either end will be covered with flashing to make the structure more water proof.  I realize that there will likely be roof leaks with the many holes through the metal, but we don't get a ton of rain here, so I am not too worried about it.  Also with the open floor plan, keeping things dried out shouldn't be a problem

  Now all that is left to do is finish the details.  I am going to build a few nest boxes inside the front wall and cut a door on that end so that I can access the boxes from the outside.  I am also going to build boxes to fit around the wheel wells to protect tender chicken feet from any sharp metal there.  The wheel well boxes will support the roosting bars that will run the length of the coop.  Eventually I will be adding feeders and a watering system that can be accessed from the outside as well.  Since this coop is becoming an all in one chicken palace I might even build an area for food storage right on the tongue of the trailer to make things even easier for me.  For the record though I am very happy with how things look right now.  It is turning out just the way I pictured it.

Progress on the New Chicken Palace

I have had a lot going on in the past few weeks and I finally had time to get to work on new accommodations for my chickens.  The new chicken coop is being built on an old trailer frame that I had intended to make into something else.  It wasn't quite right for it's originally intended purpose but for a chicken palace it could be just perfect.

 It will be easy to move and can even travel with me if I ever move to new property.  It will be much sturdier than the original chicken coop so I shouldn't have to worry about the wind taking off with it again.  I am reusing the cattle panels from the original coop and whatever I could glean from salvaging the trailer.  I want this to be a place where the chickens can be comfortable no matter what the weather outside is doing.

I started by building the basic frame directly on top of the trailer frame.  Because of the way the trailer is designed I had to use two different widths of lumber to make the floor level.  My math was a bit off though so each end sits a little lower than the main part of the floor.  This difference won't really matter because I have to build the ends separate from the side walls anyway.

I am going with hardware cloth for the floor so that cleaning out poop should be a non-issue.  In theory it will just fall through the floor (or get pushed through by chicken feet).  Every few weeks I can just move the coop to a new area to lessen the buildup of poop under the coop.  The chickens will be able to move around under the coop so it will give them an extra layer of area to do their thing in.  The open floor will also allow good air circulation in the summer and I can close it in with straw bales in the winter for added insulation.  The hardware cloth is also extra protection from predators.  It will be nice to be able to really lock the girls up for the night again once this project is finished.

Once the hardware cloth was secured to the frame I bolted the wood to the metal trailer using carriage bolts.  At this stage I also salvaged the wheel wells from the original camper.  They were glued between sheets of plywood so I used a sawzall to cut them off the floor at ground level.  I then cut flaps into three sides and folded them out so that they would sit on the new wooden frame.   Once I was happy with the fit I screwed them into place.

They might not look pretty, but they are functional and they will keep critters from getting into the coop from around the wheels.  I will probably end up building boxes around them to protect the chicken's feet from the sharp metal edge.  The boxes will also support roosting bars on either side of the pen.

The next stage was installing the cattle panel walls that will be the framework for the final structure.

I installed the middle panel first because it had fewer places where I could attach it to the floor.  The end panels overlap the center panel by a few inches and will hopefully help keep everything firmly in place.  At this stage the structure is a bit wobbly, but once I secure each end with plywood panels it should become much more rigid.

I will be using galvanized roofing metal to make the final covering for the coop.  After struggling with plastic coverings for the last couple of years I want to use something much more permanent.  I am tossing around the idea of using a couple of clear polycarbonate panels to let in a little more light on the sides, but they are very expensive and I don't want to turn the coop into an oven in the summertime.  I might reuse some of the windows from the old trailer and install them in the plywood ends to allow better ventilation and to allow a little light in from a different angle.

Since I have been having so many issues with predators lately I really want to get this project finished.  I am now at the stage where I will need two people to keep building the structure.  Luckily I know several people that are willing to help.  Hopefully it will only be a few more days until my chickens have a sturdy new home.

Temporary House Chicken

Lately it seems as though my hens are on the local predator menu.  After losing those two hens while I was away at work I was woken up in the middle of the night by the sounds of panicked chickens.  When I ran out into yard with my headlamp I saw black feathers everywhere and one of my buff orpingtons wandering around by the young chicken's pen.  A small animal that appeared to be a cat ran off through my electric fence and stopped to watch me from several hundred feet away.  As I looked around some more I found a black hen bumbling around the yard in a dazed state.  As quickly as I could I gathered up the two hens and checked them over for injuries.  The buff seemed no worse for the wear so I put her back into the temporary shelter that my chickens had been staying in.  The black hen was definitely injured but I had to bring her inside for a better look.  I quickly set up the chick brooder cage for the hen and then went back outside to make some quick reinforcements to the chicken coop.  When I was sure that the rest of the chickens were secure from another attack I went back inside to tend to the injured hen.

Upon closer examination of the hen I found that she had a large wound on her back that was very deep.  I cleaned up what I could and set the hen up with some food and water for the rest of the night.  She needed stitches but I wasn't going to be able to do that alone.  The wound wasn't bleeding much and looked like more of a tear than a puncture. If she made it through the rest of the night I would take it as a good sign.

When daylight came I got to put my vet tech skills to the test.  I called my friend who was also a vet tech to help me sew up my chicken.  We met up at her groom shop and got to work.  I didn't have proper suture supplies being as I no longer worked for a vet clinic, so I improvised with a sewing needle and thread soaked in rubbing alcohol.  The wound was a V shaped gash that was nearly an inch wide and a couple inches long.  My friend restrained the chicken while I stitched her up and we were both impressed by how well she took it.  Chickens can be extremely stoic.

When I was done I was pretty happy with how it looked.  It seemed to close up nicely and hopefully I will be able to pull her stitches in just a couple of weeks.  Until then she is getting her own space in the chick brooder cage.  Here she is limited by how much she can move around so that should help with healing.  She also won't have to contend with the rooster's innuendos of love or be bothered by the other hens.  Once the stitches come out she should be able to return to the flock.  I will have to keep checking the wound daily to make sure that she isn't developing an infection.  I am hoping that I can get away with not using antibiotics on her so that I can keep using her eggs.  She was unstressed enough that she even laid an egg right after we got home from getting sutured up.

Weeding and Mulching

In an effort to lessen the amount of weeding that I will be doing this summer I am covering the garden beds one by one with a thick layer of straw mulch.  Before I lay down any mulch I try to remove as many weeds as I can so that they won't spread under the mulch.  Once I have removed everything that I don't want growing in the bed I lay down a nice thick layer of straw to cover any bare earth between the plants.  The mulch will shade the ground which can prevent new weed seeds from germinating.  The protected soil won't lose moisture to the air as fast so the plants growing in the mulch will be able to make better use of the available water in the soil.  The shaded soil will also be less susceptible to extreme temperature swings which makes for a more stable environment and happier plants in the garden.  I use straw for mulch because it is biodegradable, it allows water to percolate into the soil, and it doesn't contain seeds like hay does which would only make more weeding work for me.

I am also mulching the garden paths heavily because I really don't want to spend any more time pulling weeds than I have to.  Mulching the paths will also help the adjacent garden beds hold moisture better because it adds more volume to the area that is protected from wind and sun, thus keeping more precious water in the soil.

It is slow progress and I am focusing on weeding one bed in the morning before work and mulching it in if I have the time.  Hopefully once I get things under control around the vegetables I will have more time to turn my attention to other areas of the yard like the flower garden and perennial bed.  Summer harvests are just around the corner and will soon be consuming my precious spare time, so I want to clear what I can before I can't.