It Begins with a Coop

The advantage of living on 12 acres is that your neighbors aren't very close. You can look out the window or sit on the porch and admire the openness of the land. In the spring, the grass is tall and gracefully bows to the whimsy of the winds on any given day. It is infinitely peaceful to watch the birds go about their business and the squirrels dash about looking for delicacies to take back to their hiding places. With the dogs laying beside you, it just doesn't get much better than that!

The disadvantage of living on 12 acres is that you have to do something with all that land. While the grass is beautiful during its tall phase (up to my knees), it does die and becomes a thick, almost impenetrable mat on the ground. Cleaning up that much dead grass is no easy feat and can become very costly in terms of time and equipment. The logical solution is to hire a person to come in and cut it for baling, but you quickly find out that unless you have at least 50 acres, it's not worth the hay baler's time to come out. The other problem we discovered is that our driveway entrance is too narrow for the equipment to enter without a wheel going off into the ditch. If a baler is able to get in, the cost of the bales exceeds the market value, so we've already lost. Time to give up on the hay business!

Since last fall, Bob has probably viewed most every YouTube video about raising chickens--from the construction of the coop to how to make them happy so they'll lay more eggs (seriously). Thanks to a friend who needed to get rid of a dog house, Bob was inspired to create his chicken haven. Moving it here required a lot of effort, but with help, the dog house was relocated to its new home. 

His first task was to raise and level it. Since the dog house had been built out of 2x6's, he had to use his ingenuity to raise it and eventually level it as much as possible. The dog house was constructed with a porch and asphalt shingle roof, and with a roomy inside space, he was ready to make it into a chicken-friendly home. 

Inspired by the videos he'd watched, he set about designing nesting boxes, roosting places, ventilation, a large, safe area for scratching and foraging, and an automatic door opener and closer to let them out of the coop in the morning and tuck them in at night (yes, you read that correctly). The more videos he watched, the more features he wanted to incorporate, and the bigger the whole coop was becoming.

When you live in an area that is rife with coyotes, wildcats, possums, skunks, hawks, and snakes, safety becomes an important issue. It seems that every predator likes chicken, and once discovered, the chickens disappear quickly without protection. This prompted Bob's determination to construct a large foraging area that would both keep his "girls" safe as well as allow them the freedom to scratch and peck at the ground. The coop was becoming a fort!

The more 4x4s he put into the ground, the more he needed as there was always something more that he wanted to do. He designed two separate areas for the chickens to scratch in, one of which is closed off to allow for regeneration of grass. Each now has its own roosting ladder along with a "slide" covered with wire so they can walk up to the highest level. Swings are provided for the more adventurous! 

It was a big job putting on the wire to cover the top and sides, and with the exception of the very bottom, that task is finally done. Bob is trying to cover every possible risk that could happen, and I think he's going to succeed. 

The continuous rain that we've had since February has made it impossible to do the finishing work, and we can only hope that the showers will slow down enough to allow the ground to dry out sufficiently to allow for the trenching of the water and power lines and final placement of the bottom wire. 

For now, we are enjoying watching our 13 chicks grow, all the while being kept safe and warm in their new home!