Need A New Poultry Enclosure - Advice Wanted

 Okay, so the ducks in the polytunnel have had a great winter. Warmer, with a bit of water changed everyday to clean and swim in. The trouble is it prevents me from growing so much winter and early spring produce. One of the main reasons I had a polytunnel in the first place - it helps bridge the hungry gap. 

There has been a warning of avian flu just 3 miles away so I'm worried that the lockdown might last longer than last year and eat into spring, which would affect my summer crops as well. 

So I want them out! 

Pasture Pen Nest Box Upgrade

The bucket nest boxes I originally put in the Heras Panel Pasture Pens never really worked very well, They just weren;t quite big enough and could cause hens to break eggs. But because I used these pens more for grow outs it didn't matter too much and I changed the one I used for the layers into a bigger nest box like the one in this post. 

Currently I have all three of these pens with potential laying hens in. So it was time to upgrade the last two pens to have proper nest boxes, which can even stay in when raising meat birds in there as well. 

Chicken Tractor Refurb!

When you keep more than just a few chickens having some extra pens is essential. 

They have lots of uses but having somewhere to keep a poorly chicken away from the others is essential and a pen around this size also makes for a great broody coop for a hen to sit on some eggs and have the chicks have safe access to some grass outside. 

This chicken tractor/ark is one I built in 2008. The picture above is how it looked when I first built it, complete with cedar cladding in our very tidy garden at our first house!

The picture below is me putting our first ex-battery hens in the coop and my first chickens since leaving home.

What Chickens Are On The Homestead?

I seem to have a lot of chickens here at the moment.

I haven't spoken about them much this year on the blog so I thought I'd give a run down of what I've got and what they're for. 

Building A Free Chicken Coop!

My pasture chicken coops are working our great, fresh grass each day, helps to keep the chickens healthy.

My chicken plans change day by day though. At the moment I'm thinking that as well as having my two regular egg laying pens (for sales and for ourselves) and one mobile pen for meat birds (doing a few batches throughout the year to keep us supplied in meat) I also want to set up some breeding birds, so I can sell fertile eggs and point of lay pullets from a breed we'll pick as a family. 

My new coop built for free

For this I want to create some permanent pens, maybe a short row of them, each with a coop and a pair of runs off each that can be seeded and rotated. The idea being to keep a breeding trio or four in each pen, keep blood lines pure and chickens happy. 

I've already got one coop spare:

Spare coop - not the easiest to move! Houses a 10 birds though! 

And my mobile coop that I built a few years ago has been converted into my chick brooder now:

Chicken coop converted into a chick brooder - It might gain a extension yet as I'd like to do 30 bird batches rather than 20 (day old chicks are cheaper if you buy over 25 birds).

 I've learnt a lot from building lots of chicken coops over the years (I've built some at mum and dad's farm in the past as well as one for our old house that got covered in red mites - so I left it there). 

But one thing never changes - they're not cheap to build; wood, cladding and roofing material is always expensive and adds up quickly no matter how small it is. 

So the other day when dad offered me one of these pallet boxes for free I jumped at the chance. In fact he's offered me 20 as he will only burn them otherwise (If you're Herefordshire or Shropshire based drop me a line and I'm sure you can have one or two of them).

Some of what he orders comes in on them but the courier he uses makes it too expensive for him to use for shipping things on in them and many people collect anyway (he's a machinery dealer). 

They're 32" square and about 2ft high. Not a massive coop but ideal for around 3 or 4 birds. 

I took one home and started working on it. Got my eldest practicing her hammer skills one night, knocking nails over, she loved that!

First thing I did was to remove one side. 

It would have been easier to just cut a door way in and build a removable roof but I wanted it easier to clean and get into. Being able to sweep or scrape the droppings out is much easier than having to scoop it up and out. 

I then did what I consider essential for any chicken coop - I lifted it up off the ground. 

I lifted this up around 16 inches, this does two things: Removes anywhere for rats and mice to hide under the coop and give the chickens somewhere to shelter out of the rain without having to go in. 

The kids were helping, honest...

I then made the front removable. As I'm trying to keep cost to a minimum I used a french cleat type system, a piece of wood cut on 45 degrees means it slots nicely back into place.

This picture below shows the stop add at the bottom (one at the top as well) to make sure the front won't push in. 

The boy to show scale

The door was just a bit of scrap ply, I did use two old hinges there as well, a scrap of wood as a catch. 

  I then added the top of the pallet as a roof, adding in a 100mm (4inch) piece of timber to give it a bit of fall. The two open diagonal sides were then meshed to prevent predators entering the coop but maintaining good ventilation. 

 I had some old clear sheet material up the field a friend dropped off for me years ago, I added this on top of the wood on the roof as a waterproof layer. 

Not pretty but practical, much like myself...

 A perch at the back and a divide just in from the door, means a dark nest area. I'd like to make some roll away nest boxes in the future, that could work well in here.

French cleat in action  - saves on ironmongery! 

Nest area

This coop can be easily moved with a sack truck so at the moment it's down in the orchard, to be the cockerels new house - he's feeling a little down after being denied access to his ladies. 

A pin for Pinterest if you're into that type of thing...

Normally I hate when someone says something is built for free because of all the stuff they've got kicking around! But this time it's a waste material (the pallet box) and loads of bits I've got kicking around, I'm sure most could come up with some of these materials - maybe a bit of skip diving! 

I now need to treat the woodwork, but it should last a few years easily

The great thing is that with my eldest and youngest we built this coop within about an hour or so, it's well ventilated, big enough for 3 to 4 good sized chickens, is high enough off the ground from pests but also provides a bit of shelter under it, has a perch, nest area and can be locked up at night to keep foxes and badgers out. All it cost me a handful of screws! 

I have a feeling I'll be building a few more of these if my plans for creating some breeding pens for chickens takes shape, if not it's always handy to have spare pens for sick birds or if some need separating due to bullying or hatching out too many chicks, etc! 

What do you think to the coop? 

Would you use it or do you prefer something a little more pleasing to the eye?

Easy To Build Mobile Chicken Tractor For Under £120

I'm really pleased with my lately creation. 

I set myself a design brief on a good movable chicken coop, that's easy to construct and costs under £120 if you buy everything.

I'd been seeing a lot of chicken tractors in the states (on Justin Rhoydes YouTube channel) and I've always like the idea of having movable chicken tractors. The trouble is I end up leaving a pen in one place too long otherwise. 

One pen really caught my eye and that was one moved by a sack truck, why I'd never thought of moving them in this way before was beyond me. Suddenly I could move a much bigger coop easily and make it so it could fit a reasonable amount of birds in (the video that inspired me is here)

The trouble is they built it out of cattle panels, which are really popular in the states but not over here. 

That got me thinking about what we could use as an alternative, it was only when a friend came round and he suggested Heras panels, that the solution had been right in front of me the whole time (and was evening forming the pen for the chickens at the time!). 

Also they're cheap, strong(ish) and readily available. 

So I set about making the rest of the pen in the easiest way possible. 

Here are some key points:- 

• Easily houses ten birds.
• The roof is just a tarp (nowhere for red mites to hide) also easy and cheap to replace.
• Wheels on the back make it easy to move.
• Small access door on the front means you can get in if you need to.
• Food suspended with a spring feeder so no wasted food or grain left out overnight.
• Anti predator netting as a skirt around the outside so no need to shut the chickens in at night.
• no floor to the coop means no cleaning out and pastures are improved as it's moved along.
• Nest boxes easy to construct as they're made from builders buckets.  
• Perches are just cable tied to the heras, making adjustment easy if you need to. 
• Chickens are moved each day so the risk of picking up parasites is minimal, food consumption is reduced and pasture is improved. 
• Nest boxes are easily accessible from the back - my children now collect the eggs each day. 

I've been using this coop for over a month now and it's been great. You can see where it's been over that time and see the grass coming back at different rates, it's great that the hens are moved from their dropping each day. 

Moving it is easy (although I need to improve how it turns), so much so I've made up three of these coops, two for laying hens and a third for meat birds. 

Watch the video above to see it in action and let me know what you think. 

I'll draw up some plans and share them for free on here as well at a later date (when I get time) as well as doing a video on how I made it if people are interested. 

Pros and Cons Of A Chicken Pen Near The House

This weekend my dad and I have been carrying on with the extension and one job that needed doing was to move the chickens by the house. In doing this it gives us much better access to the garden to and to move building materials around. 

Moving the coop

This got me thinking about the pros and cons of having the chickens next to the house. I've had chickens living there in one form or another for the past 4 and a half years. It was located about 15ft from the house and was big size, easily accommodating 20 or so chickens. 

Pros -

Easy to feed your chickens kitchen scraps (if you did that, I don't of course as it's illegal in the UK..)

Easy to keep an eye on the hens - more likely to spot/hear problems 

Less likely predator attack - as the predator is much less likely to go so near to the house.

Easy to collect the eggs - I have been known to run out and grab an egg half way through baking a cake. 

Quicker to feed and check water - well it's less far to walk anyway! 

Easier to enjoy their company! 

Cons-

Noise - chickens even without a cockerel are noisy creatures. I personally like the noise they make but some people don't.

Smell - there is a little bit of smell that goes with a large flock of birds, but cleaned out regularly it's not too much of an issue.

Flies - this year this has been a major issue, we've had loads of lies in the house and we're sure it's from the chicken pen. 

Not on fresh ground - in  a fixed pen like we had by the house you can't move your hens around to give them fresh grass, although they had loads of weeds as a constant supply of greens. 

Chickens on new grass

 What do you think - anything you'd add to the list?
Do you keep your chickens near to the house?

Chicken Colditiz

Last week when I went on my days pruning the customer we were working for had a rather extreme chicken coop, he called it Guantanamo Bay but with all the wire it reminded me of a chicken colditiz castle.

Chicken Colditiz...

He resorted to these measures after the fox kept taking his chickens and then crapping on the roof of one of the coops, just to give him the finger as he left!

The pen is made out of Heras fencing, with chicken wire dug into the ground all the way round and then an added barrier at the top facing outwards to stop Mr Fox climbing in.

A pretty extreme chicken pen to erect, but I'm sure we all feel like building something like this when we have animals attacked by predators. Hopefully his will keep his birds safe but it does make me think I should increase the security on mine!

What's the most extreme pen you've ever built to keep predators at bay?