Chicken Coops: Some Design Ideas

So you’re going to have chickens in your backyard. It’s a great hobby that provides you with great entertainment, namely a practice I call CTV. Sitting out in a lounge chair watching your chickens mill about their run or free range the yard brings great insight into their reptilian heritage. At some point as they run across the yard you will see them morph into a running dinosaur.

In the meantime you must provide them with a coop that is predator proof. They cannot be left alone without a coop and a run or fencing. I have seen some mighty primitive and downright cruel chicken coops in my time. Whatever you decide on make sure that you have enough space for them to move about without being crowded. In the recent snow we had here in North Carolina, they were unable to come out of the coop for days on end so they had to do with their little space inside, which I must say is pretty spacious, but there are 27 of them and chickens are prone to cannibalism so I watched their behavior closely. Here are a few considerations for your coop.

You will need electricity in order to keep them warm in freezing temperatures, keep their water thawed, prolong their days for increased egg laying in the winter months, and in order to plug in a fence charger. Granted all of these requirements have alternate solutions however, these are common uses for electricity in the coop. I loved my first chicken coop and following are three great features my handy man brought to the table.

1. When building the roost, make it three rungs and put the top part that you would normally fasten to the wall on hinges so that you can lift up the entire roost and fasten it in an up position in order to
2. Scrape manure off of the catchment you built. The catchment sits on legs and is about 2.5 feet off the ground made from a piece of a 4’ x 8’ 1/2" plywood. This makes it so easy for you to harvest the manure for your nearby compost pile.
3. Make two pull out doors; one behind the nesting boxes which opens down and not all the way in order to gather your eggs from outside the coop. If you’re lucky you just might see your chicken lay an egg. You’ll be surprised when she stands up to do it—just like any other animal that gives birth. The other door which opens up is behind the roost in order to harvest the manure from outside into a wheelbarrow.

These are just a few ideas for you to ponder. City chickens are becoming extremely popular so make sure you check on the rules and regulations first. There is much to know about raising chickens and many good books out there on their care and feeding.

See you in the chicken yard!

A Firewood Dilemma

I have cut, split, and stacked my own firewood; purchased it from the FFA boys at Rainier High School; had someone cut down a couple of dead trees on the property and split and stack; purchased pickup truck loads and stacked it myself; and for the last two years have purchased a dump truck full that was split perfectly and had someone stack it for me. This is the dream solution . . . no muss no fuss.

It has rained and rained and rained here in Western North Carolina. The soil is saturated. Saturday it rained and rained and then the wind blew and blew. Sunday I walked out to open up my chickens and zowie—right before my eyes, a 75 foot uprooted horizontal already dead locust tree in the distance. The first thought is always: Yay! Free firewood. Then reality sets in and I remember the fiasco three summers ago when I first hired a professional tree guy to come out and cut down, split, and stack an already dead locust tree. He went up the hill, felled the tree, immediately came back down, and knocked on my back door to tell me that he underbid the job and would not be able to finish it. Oh! Swell. I sent him on his way with $80 for his time and phoned up the local high school to see if there were any young studs who could come out and finish the job—three sets of young studs and $600 later the wood job was complete. Oh yes, except for all the bark and twigs and branches. It took me another year and a half to get all that up and burned. And by the way, the dump truck full of wood costs $420 and there’s nothing to clean up.

Well, here I am again with another downed tree. I walked up there today to get a close and personal look. First of all, there is a s__t load of wood to be cut up not to mention how much refuse will be left over. Plus, on this little project the tree uprooted so there is a gigantic hole in the ground. I now have to find someone with a backhoe to come by when all the work is done to bring the root upright and put it back into the hole. And just think, there are 7 more dead locusts waiting to fall.

Soil: The Heart and Soul of Your Garden

The soil in your garden determines the nutritional value of your squash, tomatoes, onions, and everything else you grow. If your soil food web is not rife with algae, bacteria, fungi, and earthworms you will not have nutrient dense food to eat. The Wikipedia macro view: The soil food web is the community of organisms living all or part of their lives in the soil. It describes a complex living system in the soil and how it interacts with the environment, plants, and animals.

Sustainable growers spend a good deal of time building their soil in order to grow healthy plants. Healthy plants are strong and less susceptible to disease and insect infestation. Chemical fertilizers and all “cides” (pesticides, fungicides, and herbicides) kill off whatever soil food web you may have. To build your soil amend with organic material such as compost and organic soil inputs such as alfalfa meal, crab meal, fertilizer, rock dust; there is a multitude of inputs to choose from. There are certain inputs you may need that you will know only through having your soil tested.

A soil test should be the last thing you do in the fall after putting your garden to bed. The reason? Everyone else is just now, in mid January, beginning to get their act together to have their soil tested. Hence, it takes longer in the winter/spring to receive your test results. If you had done so in October you would have your test results sitting on your desk and could now figure out what you need to add, make a list and order it.

I live in North Carolina which is one of the few if only states left that does not charge for soil testing—you’d think that growers would be beating a path to their door. I guess they would if it was not for the prevailing myth that dark colored soil is rich and healthy or that clay soil is a dead end. I ring the wrong buzzer on both. Clay soil can be amended and amended and over several seasons turned into crumbly friable soil. And dark soil is just that until you have it tested.

Here’s your plan for this month. Make a diagram of your garden and number the beds. Beat feet to your nearest extension office and pick up some soil sample boxes and fill out the form. Back at the farm, takes samples from all of your beds, return them to the extension office and wait. Your test results will show the inputs you need measured in acres and you need to break them down accordingly. You will know the NPK and some minerals that are lacking and you will know the pH of the soil and how to adjust it. Organic growing practices say that optimum pH is between 5.8 and 6.8. You can get a PhD in soil science; there are weekend workshops dedicated to learning this art. This small treatise is just the beginning for you.

If you live in North Carolina, the annual Organic Grower’s School is being held this year on the first weekend in March at UNC Asheville (http://www.organicgrowersschool.org)

See you in the garden!

One Small Step for Humankind

Forthcoming is a topic I write and speak about early and often. Like your mother, I harp, I nag, I pester, I badger and I bug. But really, it’s just common sense to begin at the beginning when you’re looking for self-reliance in the kitchen. I am going to ask you to give up certain habits, some of them could be called compulsive, in order to walk your talk and a little easier on the earth.

The first order of business concerns paper towels. They are found in every kitchen and may be found in the garage and laundry room. Are you sitting down? I am going to ask you to totally relinquish the use of paper towels. Imagine that! I know you can do this because I did it in 1988. Since that time I’ve used its precursor—rags! Rags are plentiful. Rags are washable and ultimately reusable. Get a bucket and put some under your sink, in the garage and in the laundry room. When something spills on the floor, use a rag to wipe it up. I know it’s not very Martha Stewart, but it’s darn easy on the earth. We all know it takes trees, bleach, pulp, resin, adhesive and a bunch of fresh water to make a paper towel for you to wipe up some water off the counter. (Is this arrogant?) The energy on the front end hardly justifies its eventual use, not to mention that it finally lands in the landfill. So c’mon, get with the program.

So you might guess that the next give-up is paper napkins. Cloth napkins are washable, reusable and if after washing them, you smooth them out around your washing machine they look like they’ve just been ironed.

Finally, we move to the state bird of Interstates, you find them hanging, flapping, and puffing from tree branches on every highway and byway. You guessed it—plastic grocery bags. Here’s where a bit of behavior modification enters in. Once you commit to carrying reusable bags in the backseat of your car you must remember two things: Take them into the store with you. And, even though you get through the front and door and remember that they’re still in the backseat, you cannot say, “next time.” Because you’ve committed to the process you must return to the car, painful as it may be, and fetch your market bags. The other thing you must remember is to return the bags to your car after putting away groceries. I have schlepped my own market bags for the last 22 years. I figure that I have saved over 500,000 bags and a lot of energy. By the way, market bags are not exclusive to grocery stores, you can actually take them in any store. Here’s to change!

18 Eggs Today

Eighteen eggs today. My timing is a little off. I have 15 young pullets that I got in the mail last April. Actually, I got 25 in the mail and sold ten before they were out of diapers so to speak. Remember when I said brooding chicks in the basement was a dusty mess—well this is of what I speak. Brooding chicks consists of getting a couple of refrigerator boxes from behind Massie’s and setting up a couple of heat lamps, shavings, food and water. I brood them in the basement and when they get fully feathered and big enough so that the black snakes won’t eat them I pen them in the corner of the chicken coop. This is about at 12 to 14 weeks.

Once when I was not paying attention to the still small voice that said—wait! I put chicks in the corner pen. I came in the coop to check on them and there was a black snake with one halfway down its gullet and another one constricted at his tail end. Wow—I went primal. First of all black snakes are not poisonous but even so, snakes are creepy. So I got a shovel, scooped him up and took it outside and beat the holy tar out of him. Did I mention I went primal? Only later did I realize that I didn’t need to kill the snake—it was just having lunch; it was just following its nature. I could have just let him go. I will be more temperate next time.

Anyway, back to why my timing is off. I didn’t want to get the chicks so early like in January or February that it would be cold and hard on them living in the basement—like this year for instance. Chickens lay eggs according to how much light they get and first year layers lay one egg almost every day. As they get older they lay one ever two to three days and the eggs get bigger. In the summer they lay more. I wanted to sell eggs at the Farmer’s Market last year but alas the girls did not really start laying until last week. Imagine that. Now I will have to wait until April when market opens to have a place to sell. So today I got the most eggs ever—18, which makes me a busy bee on the telephone calling around for customers to sell to rather than lollygagging at my table at the Farmer’s Market, drinking a cup of coffee and gabbing with Sheryl.

I’ll get to the Auschwitz girls soon, I promise.

The Rooster’s Gotta Go

Common chicken conversation: “Would you like a rooster? Sure, I’ll give it another go.” I have had this conversation many times in the 23 years I have been raising laying hens and four months after that the rooster starts attacking me and then he’s history. No different this time. I really liked this guy too. He’s beautiful though I can’t figure out what breed he is. I will take a photo and post it. I’m going to put him on Craig’s List too.

Roosters do have a place in the chicken yard. There job is to procreate and to protect the hens. The thing is most of the chickens that hobbyists buy these days from commercial hatcheries such as Murray McMurray or Stromberg have had the broodiness bred out of them hence the fertilized eggs do not get hatched. A broody hen is one that wants to sit on a nest and hatch eggs anad she expresses her broodiness by contiually sitting on a nest. It takes 21 days to hatch a clutch of eggs and the hen sits on the nest about 23 hours and 30 minutes a day. She gets off to drink water, eat and eliminate otherwise she is on the nest in a kind of hypnotism. When a hen goes broody she may have very few eggs under her and if you can catch this in the beginning you can put eggs under the hen at night in the dark and she will accept them. We’ve put up to 10 eggs at a time under a hen. Not all will hatch out but most do and it is far better to have a hen raise up and brood the baby chicks than for you to do it in your basement in a giant refrigerator box. It makes a big dusty mess and you have to be on top of their care and feeding several times a day. If I see that one of my hens goes broody after I get rid of rooster boy, I can always get some fertilized eggs from a hobbyist friend, though I probably won’t know what breed they are.

Next time I talk to you about chickens, I’m going to share a story about the chickens we rescued from the egg hatchery near our farm in Washington State. We called them the Auschwitz girls.

How I lived for 3 days without running water.

So, back to how I lived three days without running water. First of all, I have stashed away in the basement 11 5-gallon water bottles for times like these. However, I had only 6 of them filled. In November I filled two more and labeled them with the date. I had a 3-gallon container with an olla-type water dispenser in the kitchen from the snow before Christmas so I used this for my drinking water. The rest was meted out as needed. A real eye opener was that I used most of my water stores for flushing the toilet and for chicken water. I have 27 chickens and they usually drink about 2-3 gallons per day depending on the weather.

Next I set up a dish washing and rinsing station using big bowls. I used the wash and rinse water for the day’s dishes and the next day I poured it in the toilet tank. At one point I filled up the toilet tank and the next time I was ready to flush it which was hours later, there was no water. It had all drained out so I wasted 2.5 gallons there and put water in when I was ready to flush. I kept the teakettle full of hot water for dishes, tea, coffee and general cooking. I showered and washed my hair at the gym. I had to constantly plan for my water use.

This small exercise in self-reliance was not a total immersion since I as able to move about, go to the gym, grocery store, etc. But it sure was an eye-opener. As soon as the current thaw we are having is finished, I will fill the 11 5-gallon bottles and stash them in the basement. I also discovered in this run through that the water which I had stored years ago and which was not treated with bleach btw will last a long time in the dark cool basement.

The takeaway from this run through is:

1. Do one thing every day toward your self-reliance: store water; order your seeds, etc.
2. Don’t put off anything until tomorrow.
3. Make it fun.