Moving Day

It is time to get the chickens out of the house. They are loud, they smell, and their habitat is a blight on my living room. Also, they are slightly more than three weeks old! How time flies.


Chicken Portrait, The Teenage Years: Prop Joe, Stringer, Avon and Marlo.

The coop still isn't entirely ready, but it's good enough so out they go today.


I think the coop is pretty cool; we'll see if mice gnaw through the floor and then weasels get in, or if owls saunter in through an open door, eat our chickens and then roost there (seriously; this is a major concern of chicken raising. Who knew?). The bump-out is the nest box. It has a hinged lid so theoretically you can just lift up the lid and collect eggs. I'll believe it when I see it. There are also three chicken-sized doors around the other sides, and a larger window on the back. On the inside there are two roosts made of closet rods, and a feeder and waterer that we will hang from the roof with chain. We're also going to give them their heat lamp for another few days. More coop pictures here.

We still haven't fenced in their yard; hopefully we'll get that done next weekend. Since predatory birds of about a dozen different types and neighbor dogs are the main chicken predators around here, the fence is a major issue. In the meantime, they can live inside the coop and get used to that.

Windy Day

So, we had sustained winds of 30-40 MPH with gusts up to 60 MPH (or so I hear from the internet; I haven't convinced A to spend $300 on a weather station yet but I'm working on it). Our partially finished chicken coop did not remain in its upright position. Thankfully, no chickens were harmed in our little recreation of Twister -- they're still in the living room. And in fact, the chicken coop seems to have maintained its structural integrity. We're just going to move it to its final resting place tomorrow, re-attach it to its floor, and then hopefully get the windows and doors in ASAP. At which point it will be finished, more or less -- at least move-in ready. We'll probably paint it at some point, but the house isn't even painted yet so I don't know how the chicken coop rates. Hopefully the additional weight and being more bottom heavy will prevent another tip-over.

We'll still need to fence the chicken yard, but that shouldn't take too long. More likely than not our chickens will end up as a hawk/coyote/fox buffet, but hopefully if nothing else we'll learn some things about fencing and coop building/security for next year.

It Hasn't Got *Much* Poop In It: Chickens, Part Two

See, this is where not having a clue what we're doing really starts to hamper our efforts: we cannot keep chicken poop out of the waterer, they climb all over (and occasionally tip) their feeder, and any morning now I'm going to get out of bed and the Rubbermaid will be empty because they've all escaped.



The water is the biggest issue. I'm tempted to blame it on the chickens, who are very dumb and who are, after all, the ones actually flinging their litter into it and befouling it (pun unintentional). But blaming creatures whose brains can't be any larger than a pencil eraser isn't getting the crap out of the waterer.

The problem is that we need to get the edge raised up to about "shoulder" high, either by hanging or by propping it up. I've been trying to think of some way to hang it for 15 days with no luck, and I've propped it on half a dozen things, which are either too high (dehydrated chickens), too rickety (flooded chickens) or too low (poop in the water). The thing I have it propped on right now is a pretty good height, but they actually stand on the left edge and dip their butts into the water. I'm not sure if this is because they are rock stupid, or because they are taunting me. Either way, it's not working. Our next plan is those cheap red garden bricks. Wish us luck.

The feeder seems to be okay for the moment (yes, that is an empty Diaper Genie refill it's sitting on; the tuna can was too tippy). Of course, they're going to get taller and start climbing all over it again. But at this point I'm sort of thinking they're only going to be in there for another week and a half or so. Let them have their fun. They don't seem to poop in the food, anyway.

And our final issue: the chance of escape. I tried to rig up a cover for the container out of chicken wire yesterday, but that stuff is impossible to work with. Now I'm thinking an old window screen would work pretty well, but of course I haven't got one. Hopefully I have a few more days to work on it before we have to fish chickens out from under the kitchen sink.



Chicken Portrait: Marlo, Prop Joe, Avon and Stringer. Marlo in particular is really fledging out a lot.

Chickens

Alright, so there's a bunch of stuff we've already done this year that I really ought to blog about, and I ought to introduce us and explain what this is all about, but it's too daunting so I'm just going to start from now and get to that stuff when I have time. Hi! We are L and A, two idiots who are trying to farm.

Now that that's out of the way -- these are our chickens:



They are two Barred Rocks (the black ones) and two Rhode Island Reds (the red ones). In this picture they are about 11 days old.

We chose these breeds because 1) they're supposed to be good layers (although not necessary the best), 2) they're supposed to be a little more "friendly" than the best laying types, 3) they're readily available, 4) they're supposed to be good foragers, and 5) I wanted pretty chickens.

We bought them last Saturday when they were 3 days old, and it seems like about half the size. They have really fledged out in a week, especially the Rhode Islands. They'll stay in their box for about 2 more weeks, and then move into the chicken coop (depending on the weather, we'll either leave them locked in there with the heat lamp, or let them "loose" in the chicken yard).

The set-up we have them in is a large (about 3x2x2 foot) Rubbermaid container with the lid off. The feeder you can see on the left is purchased, with a pint jar that screws in. It's set on top of a tuna can to raise it up. The waterer is one 8" cake pan set on another (inverted) cake pan, with a quart jar filled with water in the middle for a weight. Not pictured: cheap digital thermometer, a 250 watt red heat lamp bulb in an aluminum clamp fixture, clamped to the repurposed frame of a cheap canvas stand-alone closet. We actually have this sitting in our living room and I've been surprised at how little it smells. We've changed out the litter once.

We would like very much to be able to hang both the waterer and the feeder because the chickens kick litter into the water and climb into the feeder, but so far I haven't come up with any clever ideas for this. We have a larger purchased waterer, but it doesn't fit in the container. We're also going to have to put something over the top soon, or else there'll be chickens in the living room. The Rhode Islands seem to be a little "flightier", but frankly they're all making me a little nervous.

BTW, their names are (from left to right) Avon, Prop Joe, Marlo and Stringer. More chicken pictures can be found here.