life on garden time
I suspect anyone who has a chicken coop with a human-sized door has encountered the problem of door-blockage. Chickens adore kicking and scratching in the straw and dirt and debris of the coop floor, and tend to make little mountains and valleys from their scratching efforts. Mulch Mountain The mountain chickens create is always immediately [Continue Reading...]
The nesting box is a pretty important part of the coop – it’s where the chickens, hopefully, lay their eggs. Our nesting box has seen a couple of modification lately. One worked. One really didn’t. Let’s start with the failure, shall we? Fail! Using Shredded Paper For Nesting Box Material In an effort to turn [Continue Reading...]
I’ve had a few readers ask for coop updates since we switched the area under the rooting bars from straw to sand. Ask and ye shall receive. Sand Bed Update The sand bed under the roosting bars is working out very well. The sand works like kitty litter and dries the chicken poop out. There is [Continue Reading...]
Last week Williams-Sonoma branched out from French dishwear, excellent knives and seasonal high-end cocoa mix into urban homesteading gear. With the launch of their Agrarian line, Williams-Sonoma now sells gardening gear, chicken and bee keeping supplies, seeds, edible plants, fruit trees and preserving supplies. Some people in the hardcore DIY community (you know who you [Continue Reading...]
I like working on the coop. This past weekend I swapped the raised hen house area of the chicken coop from a straw-bed floor to a sand-bed floor. When I bought our first two hens, who we acquired as grown layers, the owner kept an immaculate coop with a sand bed under the roosting area and swore [Continue Reading...]
The Chicken Coop, as I’ve mentioned, was done…well, done enough, anyway. But as all of our girls have come on-line in their laying, I felt like they needed a little reward in the form of a little minor coop improvement project. Besides, I needed something to do besides can more damn peaches. 1. We weeded [Continue Reading...]
The builder of our chicken coop turned it over to us with just a few final details left to handle: painting, notably, and any sort of facade-bling we wanted to add. We painted Coop 2.0 gray because that was the only color exterior paint we had on hand (you may recall me saying that exact [Continue Reading...]
On Saturday the chickens were moved from their indoor Pack & Play brooder to their permanent home – the outdoor coop. The chickens are five weeks old and seem fully feathered to my new-chicken-keeper eyes so we decided it was time for them and their constant, unending pooping to move outside. We put down a [Continue Reading...]
I am learning what every first-time chicken keeper knows: chickens grow fast. At three weeks old, our 6 birds had outgrown their rubbermaid brooder. They were getting a bit too excited about their flight feathers and were constantly crashing into things, like the mesh ceiling of their brooder. They clearly needed more free ranger space. Thankfully, [Continue Reading...]
Homebrew Husband and I try to make sensible economic decisions regarding the garden and the investment we make in it. We have a pretty good idea what our inputs and outputs are, and most years we take out more from the garden, financially speaking, than we put in. That said, sometimes we get carried away. Sometimes the [Continue Reading...]
Dear readers: I recognize that for some of you, spring does not represent chickens and eggs. I kindly implore you to indulge me one more chickens post. Then, I promise, I will return to our regularly scheduled program of veggie gardening and wonderful food. Thank you. The coop is up. Three days of sawing, hammering [Continue Reading...]
This weekend has been a total whirlwind. We’ve been building a coop for our new chickens and planting fruit trees like crazy. I had hoped that I’d have a nice, wrapped-up project to write about for Monday morning, but the truth is, as I write this post at Sunday at 10 pm, none of our [Continue Reading...]
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