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.
- Image via Wikipedia
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
