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
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
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Follow some simple rules and you’ll have happy chooks and lots of eggs
Happy healthy chooks are a delight to manage and will provide you with plenty of tasty nutritious eggs. However you need to spend a little time understanding what you should be doing to keep your chooks happy and healthy.
The first requirement is to provide a proper chicken coop that is well suited to their needs. The chicken coop should be large enough to house the number of birds that you have as overcrowding can cause fighting and disease. We have talked about the size of a chicken coop before.
Not only that but it must be well ventilated. If it is fully enclosed and is prone to dampness then you will have sick chickens. It needs to have openings to allow for the flow of air, and these should be covered with chicken wire to prevent the entry of foxes.
You must ensure that it is waterproof to prevent the entry of dampness.
You also need to clean your chicken coop regularly. There’s a range of different materials that you can use as litter, my preference is sawdust however straw works well too. However this will become contaminated with droppings over time and you will need to clean out the litter regularly.
If at any time it appears that any of your birds are sick they should be removed from the flock. You should examine your birds for parasites, this is the subject of a different article.
Any birds with parasites should be treated properly and you should also be treating the chicken coop at the same time as parasites happily live in chicken coops.
To treat the chicken coop my preference is commercially available flea bombs, one is sufficient. Cover all openings so that the wind will not remove the insecticide.
Keep your chooks well away for the day as well.
Follow a few simple basic rules and you will have happy healthy chooks.
