I’ve had a few readers ask for coop updates since we switched the area under the rooting bars from straw to sand. Ask and ye shall receive. Sand Bed Update The sand bed under the roosting bars is working out very well. The sand works like kitty litter and dries the chicken poop out. There is…
Chickens
Giveaway: Free Range Chicken Gardens and The Fresh Egg Cookbook
Edible gardeners want to eat what they grow. Chicken owners want happy egg-laying helpers. But happy, free-ranging chickens will mess up a veggie patch faster than you can say cotyledon. And that is the conflict garden-growing chicken-owners face. Thankfully, Free-Range Chicken Gardens, the new book by landscape designer and chicken expert Jessi Bloom, tells you how…
Solitary Confinement for Chickens
When I let the hens out for some free range time yesterday, I noticed one of the Austra Whites was bloodied about the comb. We have two of this breed, and the other one was bullied a few months ago in the same way. I was so concerned about the mess of blood on our…
The Real Bounty of The Coop (Hint: It's Not Eggs)
Chickens have changed the way I think about gardening, and I’m not just talking about bull-rushing a garden bed to shoo the little cluckers out of my arugula. Again. No, something is happening to the way I think about garden inputs and outputs, and it all hinges on chicken shit. Before we got our hens…
More Coop Improvement Projects: Sand Bed-Deep Litter Hybrid and More
I like working on the coop. This past weekend I swapped the raised hen house area of the chicken coop from a straw-bed floor to a sand-bed floor. When I bought our first two hens, who we acquired as grown layers, the owner kept an immaculate coop with a sand bed under the roosting area and swore…
3 Myths About Chickens, Debunked
Chickens are not what you expect. Now don’t get me wrong, I love my hens. I love their enthusiastic productivity, their damn near egg-a-day fecundity. I love their retirement plan (soup) almost as much. But there are a lot of myths about chickens floating around out there, and they deserved to be debunked. Myth One:…
Herding Chickens
If you had told me ten years ago that I’d spend part of my Sunday herding chickens through a vegetable garden, I never would have believed you. But as I spent part of last Sunday herding chickens through our vegetable garden, something struck me: herding chickens is essentially – perhaps entirely – probabilistic. Gently persuade…
The Kids Who Will Save The World
You know how you read the newspaper (or whatever passes for a newspaper in your world – for me it’s the Google news homepage and my blog feed reader) and by the time your coffee is tepid you’ve discovered thirteen new ways in which The World Is Going To Hell In A Handbasket? Like most…
Coop Improvement Projects
The Chicken Coop, as I’ve mentioned, was done…well, done enough, anyway. But as all of our girls have come on-line in their laying, I felt like they needed a little reward in the form of a little minor coop improvement project. Besides, I needed something to do besides can more damn peaches. 1. We weeded…
Q: Why Did The Chickens Cross The Road?
A: To freak out my neighbors.Homebrew Husband and I go on approximately one date a month, if we’re lucky. Lately they’ve been less frequent, and have included our little guy, which does take some of the romance out of the mix. Anyway, last Friday was Date Night! We dropped our daughter off for an evening of…
The Chicken Coop Is Done…Enough.
The builder of our chicken coop turned it over to us with just a few final details left to handle: painting, notably, and any sort of facade-bling we wanted to add. We painted Coop 2.0 gray because that was the only color exterior paint we had on hand (you may recall me saying that exact…
Moving To The Big-Girl Coop
On Saturday the chickens were moved from their indoor Pack & Play brooder to their permanent home – the outdoor coop. The chickens are five weeks old and seem fully feathered to my new-chicken-keeper eyes so we decided it was time for them and their constant, unending pooping to move outside. We put down a…