A good chicken coop nesting box doesn’t need to be complicated

We’ve spoken before about the importance of chicken coop nesting boxes. The chicken coop nesting box is where your chickens go to lay their eggs.

As eggs are one of the primary reasons for keeping chickens you need to make sure that they have somewhere comfortable and convenient to lay.

A nesting box doesn’t need to be complicated. In our experience it also doesn’t need to be large. A box which is sufficiently big to house one chicken is preferable because if it is much bigger you will find them trying to lay in the same box together at the same time.

There are all sorts of ways to get a nesting box in your chicken coop. Here’s a couple of videos showing you some of the options.

Video number 2, showing you what happens when more than one chicken try and lay in the same nesting box.

Get started making your own chicken coop nesting box.

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There’s a good and bad side to keeping chickens, but the good outweighs the bad

There’s no doubt that keeping chickens can be a stack of fun. Our family certainly loves it, particularly the children, and in our view chooks are pretty much the ideal pet. There’s lots of positives to keeping chickens, but there are also some negatives, so let’s have a look at both the positives and negatives of keeping chooks.

Lets consider the positives first.

1. All those yummy free range eggs.

You can’t go past fresh free range eggs to eat. Nothing in the supermarket will beat them. Enough said.

2. Get rid of nasty bugs.

If you allow your chooks to free range around the garden then they will clean up many nasty bugs for you. They love to scratch to uncover those bugs. A couple of summers ago we had a massive grasshopper plague throughout the area where we live. But you should have seen how quick our chickens gobbled up hundreds of grasshoppers every day.

3. Have wonderful pets.

Our kids just love their chooks. Don’t assume that just because they are birds they won’t make a good pet. Chooks are wonderful pets.

4. Have fresh clean meat.

Some people kill their chickens for food and others do not. Some are horrified at the thought of killing their own chickens. We have in the past killed roosters for food as there is very little you can do with roosters and mostly nobody else wants them. Currently however we have found someone else who is happy to take them off our hands.

If you choose to kill your own birds to eat you can be confident in the knowledge that you are getting clean, fresh free range chicken meat that does not have any of the downsides of supermarket chicken. They are not cage reared (see the photo), they are not fed antibiotics and they have had a good life up to a certain point.

Now let’s look at some of the negatives.

1. You don’t get eggs all the time.

Sad to say but most good laying hens will still take some time off during the year for a rest. We generally find that we get few if any eggs during winter. So despite the fact that we have a yard full of chooks we do find ourselves buying eggs over winter. Of course we still have to feed them and despite the fact that we feed them or our vegetable scraps we still use commercial layers pellets which of course cost money.

2. Crows

It seems that where we live has been invaded by crows. This may not be the case where you live near us huge families of crows seem to have moved in. Explanations we have seen include that last year’s bushfires burned a lot of their feed and they have moved into more populated areas in search of food. Sadly they are using our eggs as food.

Crows are particularly wily, and once they discover where the eggs are laid it’s very hard to stop them getting the eggs, we have been struggling with this for some months. Crows are getting into our chicken coop and stealing our eggs and we have not been able to stop it.

3. Chooks get sick.

Whilst it’s probably fair to say that chooks are relatively healthy they aren’t healthy all the time. Currently we have one of our chooks living in a box in the house as she seems to be unwell. And from time to time we go into the chook yard and discover a dead chook. Of course everything dies, but this is distressing to the children.

4. Scratching.

Whilst it is true, as we said, that chooks will eat up so many nasty bugs around your garden they do so combined with lots of scratching to uncover them. This can make a little mess of your garden unless you attempt to control it somehow, though it does aerate the soil.

5. There’s some work involved.

If you are keeping chickens you need to be prepared for some work. This will include regular cleaning of the chicken coop, cleaning of food and water containers and pest control measures. Chickens can suffer from various infestations including mites, which we will talk about another day, however you do need to spend some time and do some work preventing this. Read the rest of this entry

You must protect your chooks from foxes

Some people are entirely happy to build a chicken coop and expect their chickens to live in that all their life. We prefer our chickens to have an outdoors life during the day, because we feel that keeping your chooks cooped up inside all day isn’t a nice thing to do to them.

So if you’re going to let your chooks out of the chicken coop during the day you have some decisions to make.

Will you allow yourchickens to free range around the garden? There are some advantages and disadvantages to allowing your chickens to free range around the garden. They will clean up the garden of many nasty bugs that are probably eating your flowers. However chickens love to scratch and they will also scratch up the garden as well. If you have lots of nice vegetable seedlings recently planted chances are they will scratch these up, so you will need to protect them.

And if you allow your chooks to free range then you must ensure that they are all back in the chicken coop at night, or chances are very high that a predator such as a fox will turn one of your chooks into a tasty meal.

If you prefer not to allow your chooks to free range around the garden but wish to allow them out of the chicken coop during the day you will need to build a run for them. As we live in the country and have plenty of room our chicken run is enormous, and would be at least 30 metres square. This is probably too much but if you can why not.

However chooks can fly quite well and if you wish to keep them in the run you will need to build fences at least 1.8 to 2 metres high. Otherwise they will fly over the fence.

It’s also very important to realise that predators and in particular foxes will make all efforts to get your chickens. This applies in the city as well as the country. There are several ways to protect your chickens from foxes. Foxes will dig quite happily so when you are building your fence lay about 15 to 20 centimetres of the chicken wire horizontally just under the ground pointing outwards so that a fox who digs will encounter this and will be unable to continue. Read the rest of this entry

Some simple tips for orienting and building your chicken coop

There’s a few ways that you can get your own chicken coop to house your chickens, the obvious to are to build one or to buy one. If you can scrounge materials successfully it can be quite cheap to build your own chicken coop.

However whether you plan to build or to buy one you do need to think about a few things about where you will put your henhouse and how you will position it.

It’s best to face your henhouse towards the east or the north-east. This allows the morning sun to warm the henhouse but protects it from the hot afternoon sun in the summer. On the western side of your chicken coop plant shrubs or trees that can provide shade after lunchtime.

If you have chicken wire across the front of the coop this allows the suns rays to enter in the morning. It’s very important to have chicken wire across a part of the chicken coop for another reason as well. It is essential to ensure that the coop has good ventilation, preferably with 2 places with mesh wire to allow the entry and the exit of breeze.

As you will need to clean the chicken coop regularly you will need to allow for this when building it.

For example we built our own chicken coop with a door that is large enough to allow entry of a wheelbarrow so that we can shovel the waste material directly into the wheelbarrow without having to take it outside to do so and can also bring in wheelbarrow loads of new sawdust, which we use to line the floor of the chook house.

You also need to consider what you will make your henhouse from. We used second-hand Cyprus posts 4 inches square as uprights, put a simple frame between them to allow for nailing of weatherboards, put a single piece of timber across the centre of the roof for attaching second-hand corrugated iron and this produced a simple but very effective shed at low cost. Of course you also need to provide both nesting boxes and perches inside the shed. Read the rest of this entry

What do nesting boxes in chicken coops actually do, and how big should they be?

We’ve recently been asked about chicken nesting boxes. What nesting boxes are, what place that they have in the chicken coop and how big they should be.

So let’s look at chicken nesting boxes for a moment. As the name suggests nesting boxes are for your chooks to nest in. This means that that is the place where they will lay their eggs, and if you leave the eggs there for them to do so they will sit on them in the hope of hatching some chicks.

Of course the likelihood of chicks hatching depends on whether or not you have a rooster. But the chooks don’t know that and they will happily sit on unfertilised eggs if you leave them in the nesting box to build up.

In our view the prime purpose of the nesting box is to give the chicken somewhere that is relatively dark. They seem to prefer nesting in dark places. They can be fussy about where they nest and we find on occasions that they will often nest in some 44 gallon drums that we have outside the chicken coop instead.

Our nesting boxes in the chicken coop that we built have a removable lid. If we leave the lid off some of the boxes they will all try to nest in the box with the lid on.

We also suspect that they prefer nesting boxes that are not only relatively dark but are also quite small. A box that is not much larger than chicken is probably ideal, and if you make it much bigger you will often find that there is another chook in the box trying to lay her egg there as well.

About the most important consideration for nesting boxes is that they be easy to clean, so make sure they have some form of removable lid so that you can lift the lid to clean the box. Read the rest of this entry

Here’s a few things to think about when it comes to feeding and watering chickens

Of course you have to feed your chickens. So let’s talk about feeding and watering chooks for a moment.

Like every pet, and let’s face it your chooks are really just pets, you need to pay some attention to feeding and watering. We do know someone who has chickens which free range around his garden every day, and he doesn’t feed them at all because he figures that they found enough bugs in the garden to satisfy their needs. But we think that’s a bit tough, you do need to feed your chooks even if they free range during the day, we do.

So in your chicken coop you need some facilities for feeding and watering.

There are feeders is available from pet shops, or if you live in a country like we do from your regional rural store. There are hoppers which take, if you buy a big one, considerable quantities of chicken pellets and allow a small amount to dribble out the bottom for the chooks to eat, and as they eat more comes out.

The advantage of buying a big one is that you can then go away for a few days and your chooks have plenty to eat. In fact the hopper that we have in our chicken house is big enough to hold enough food to feed 14 chickens for over a week.

However if you prefer you may just leave a bowl of food in the chicken coop. But there are disadvantages to this. If the bowl sits on the floor of the coop there is a good chance the chooks will stand on it and tip it over. Rather you are better to fix the feeding bowl to the wall of the chicken coop somehow about 3 or 4 inches above the ground, or in some other way secure it. We have secured ours by hanging it on a rope from the roof of the henhouse.

It is also possible to get automatic watering bowls. If you run some simple plastic pipe to the bowl it will refill by means of a float as necessary. Having water on demand also means that you can go away on holidays while knowing that your chickens are both fed and watered.

However going away for a period of time is a little risky if you simply rely on an automatic watering bowl. A blockage in the pipe, the water stops, and you come home to dead chooks.

We have got around that by using a full-size bath tub with timber planks to allow the chickens to walk up the planks to get to the top of the bath. There are then more planks inside the bath that they can stand on to drink.

However if you do this it’s important to make sure that that chickens cannot fall in the water, because they will drown if they do so. We have done this by putting some chicken wire just below the surface of the water so that if they fall in they will land on the chicken wire. Read the rest of this entry

Why keep chickens? Here’s why, together with some chook keeping tips

Here’s a lovely video that gives you some great reasons to keep your own chickens, and some good chicken keeping tips.

And it’s just nice to see how someone else does it.

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We always like seeing different chicken coop design ideas

We like this video because it shows an innovative design for the chicken coop. The run through is a good idea and we also like the slide out metal plate for the floor of the coop.

That allows you to clean it easier. All the droppings and other mess just sit on top of the plate and you pull it out to clean it.

It’s also very handy how the chook nesting box is so easily removed, and the trays on the floor of the nesting boxes also help with cleaning.

If you’re making your own chicken coop try to incorporate some of these ideas into your hen house. They make sense and will make life easier.
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