I’ve had chickens on my little urban homestead going on about 7 months now. When I contemplate what I’ve learned it’s really quite amazing.

I learned that chickens can escape from a crudely built chicken run easily, even in spaces you think are too small for them. They especially can figure out how to get through holes in the roof. I use a dog run now and it seems to be really effective as well as very spacious.

I learned that it takes a while for chickens to get accustomed to you, but once they figure out that when you come out goodies arrive, they will swarm you.

I learned that waiting for straw to go on sale after Halloween isn’t worth the trouble of not having straw for the chicken area. Just buy it when you see it at the stores. (Don’t forget you can also use dried leaves, but they do get shredded pretty quickly)

I learned that you don’t need to feed them layer feed. They don’t even really like it. They prefer scratch grain mixed with oyster shells just fine.

I learned that being in a cold area means you have to change the water container twice a day because it freezes, but that still doesn’t make the heated water dishes worth it (to me).

I learned that chickens (mine at least) don’t like the light on in the coop, and even when you turn it on when it is super cold, they like it so little that they will actually sleep on top of the coop in the cold to avoid the light.

I learned that chickens won’t use the nesting box you have planned for them so either. Just deal with it or, make every nesting box they do use unusable until they eventually use the one you want them to.

Do any of you chicken farmers have any other thoughts to add?

Join the discussion in The Barnyard

While I won’t portend to be quite as well spoken as Wendy from the previous article, I will attempt in this edition to display my chicken coop and enclosure as well as discuss some aspects of it for your information.

The picture above is the original area of my yard that the chicken coop and run was in. This area is consistently moist and a relatively poor area of my yard to grow anything, which is why the chickens went there. It was also infested with Creeping Charlie. The chickens have eaten all the Creeping Charlie, as well as all the other material in their run down to the ground. I keep a layer of bedding down at all times. This might be leaves or grass clippings, for the most part. I also throw most of my kitchen scraps and garden debris for them to work over. About every 6 weeks I rake out the run and the coop and compost the litter.  I recently moved the chickens, so this area has been heavily mulched to prepare it for planting next spring.

I recently obtained a dog kennel from someone in the neighborhood, which I was happy to use to hold the chickens, although it wouldn’t fit into my old area.  I moved it over one of my raised garden beds.  With some careful modifications I should be able to slide this over the top of three of my garden beds, which gives those beds a turn hosting the chickens every three years or so.  As I grow my garden to the west of this location there will be more beds to spread the chickens over, as well as the possibility that I can build the beds to fit with the kennel better to use the space better.  I like this system much better than my old, pathetic system because it actually keeps the chickens contained!  With my old, built by me and my pathetic building skills, I would come out to put them away and they would be sitting on the ground outside the door waiting for me to put them back in.

Like all gardeners/homesteaders most of what I do is constantly evolving, and the chickens are no different. Right now I have two chickens in there, but I’m angling to add a few more next year, perhaps banties.  You can probably tell from this enclosure that my building skills are dreadfully sub par, and while I would like to let them free range I don’t think my neighbors would care for that too much.

About the coop, the coop was essentially built with scraps that I bought from the discount bin at the home improvement center, stuff I had lying around and 2 2×4s that I bought. Originally I was going to build a peaked roof, but that proved too difficult so I did a flat roof. This seems to work fine. I had two planters on the top of it that had lettuce in them, but I kept forgetting to water them so we’ll have to try again next year.

You can see the roost inside, which is a cut down closet pole and I use shredded paper from my office as the bedding material. The nesting box is an old Clementine box that I saved for this purpose. I have two openings, one is the “main” door that I put in for the chickens to come and go, which is on the right hand side. The other is intended for my use to access the inside to add food, water and maybe someday get some eggs. In reality, the chickens love to roost on the trap door and survey their domain and use this door frequently to enter and exit as it’s a quick hop up or down for them.  They also seem to love to sit on the roof and hang out.  Eventually I’m planning to put another roost on the roof for them to hold on to.

One thing I do like about having the run so close to the garden is that this fall I was able to dump the litter straight on the garden from the coop when I put the garden beds to sleep for the year. Chicken manure shouldn’t be added to crops directly, but since my beds were finished growing and I had all winter to let the compost mellow I dumped the litter right on. Besides, with all the bedding already in the run and coop and all the leaves and grass clippings I’ll add on the top between now and snowfall the manure ratio will be very watered down.

So far, my total investment for the eggs I’ve gotten (zero) has been quite high, but even if these chickens don’t produce any eggs in the near future it’s been a great experience and I know that I’ll raise chickens in my backyard for a long, long time.  Who knows, maybe this spring we’ll get some broilers in addition to those extra layers.

This is a guest post by Wendy from Home Is… From reading her blog I knew she had chickens, and since she lives in Maine her knowledge of building a coop that will hold up to cold weather could be quite useful.  I hope you enjoy her story of how she got chickens and how they keep them at her house.

Before I ever made my foray into chicken-ownership, I spent some time researching what I was getting into. Barbara Kilarski’s book, Keep Chickens, was a wonderful resource for everything from choosing a breed to providing information about how big their enclosure needed to be. While my hope was that they would be able to also spend some time free-ranging around the yard, my plan was to build the coop big enough that they could spend all of their time in there, if they had to.

We only have a quarter acre of land, and while my neighbors on either side, who have a half acre and an acre respectively, like my chickens, I didn’t wish to push my luck by letting my chickens loose to roam in their yards. They probably wouldn’t care … much, but as Frost’s neighbor observed in the Mending Wall, “good fences make good neighbors”, and as there is a fence there, it’s probably best that I keep “mine” on this side of it.

In addition, with only a quarter acre, space is a premium, and none can be wasted or under-utilized. Every side of my house has some edible plant or planting bed, especially the south-facing backyard. Chickens can really wreak havoc in a newly planted garden bed. They like to scratch things, and soft, newly planted soil with tasty little seedlings is too much to pass up. Don’t ask me how I know.

Not to mention that during the winter, with several feet of snow on the ground, I knew the chickens wouldn’t be doing much “free ranging”, and so they’d likely spend at least four months cooped up.

The first requirement, therefore, was that it be large enough to allow the chickens room to spread their wings, as it were.

Ms. Kilarski’s book gave me the basic dimensions we needed to ensure that the chickens had enough room, but I spent some time online looking at different designs. We had just come out of a pretty harsh winter. Our driveway isn’t big enough to plow, and so it must be shoveled. In addition to the driveway, which is roughly the size of two large parking spaces, we shovel a path from the road back to the oil and propane tanks, and ever since we moved here, we’ve always had rabbits, and so we’ve always had to shovel a path back to the rabbit cages. Plus, at some point during the winter, the snow just gets too deep for our dogs to squat anymore, and we will usually help them out by shoveling a little place for them to take care of their business. Snow. It’s a real thing here. I knew that my chicken run would have to be covered, because there was no way I was going to be shoveling it out.

Thus, the second requirement was that it have a roof of some sort – something to keep out the snow and to protect the chickens from the rain.

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