Good Morning, Mrs. Hen, How many chickens have you got? Madam, I’ve got ten. Four of them are yellow, and four of them are brown and two of them are speckled red, the nicest in the town.” ~Nursery Rhyme, a favorite with a certain little someone just now.
The coop is complete and now home to eight happy hens (though we are not sure that all of them are hens, two are growing decidedly rooster-ish): Dilly, Captain, Miss Pecks-a-Lot, Monty, Juliette, Buffy, Alys and Vita. The last two being named by me after two of my favorite gardeners.
Elijah designed the coop and Steve, Iain and Elijah built it. My sole contribution was to interrupt them when they were making excellent progress to drastically slow them down by requesting they cut scallops in that trim piece, which looked far more charming in my head and far less like the awning of an ice cream shop. Do I redeem myself at all by relaying that since these pictures we’ve added shutters and I ripped all of the wood for them? Probably not.
I’m quite enjoying keeping chickens, with the notable exceptions of the pooping on my front steps and eating of my hostas.
You guys should build a chicken tractor! We have kept our chickens in an easily moveable chicken tractor for over 14 years, and never had a problem with predators, diseases or the chickens eating my garden (or hostas). Funny you have a post about chickens – I just launched my new online course to teach about naturally raising backyard chickens, which includes a movie and schematic on how to build a chicken tractor!
We have that exact same dress – the green one
Aeowyn’s originally and now Aziel’s.
I love the chicken coop
It’s cute! The boys made it?
Ignore that last bit lol – I realized just as I hit the send button that yes you had said they did lol – that’ll teach me to post comments while tired
Melody, you are right. The lighter Barred Rock is a roo and the Buff Orpington with the red comb is as well. Nice friendly breeds though so you wont have a mean rooster at least. On the up side, you could always eat the orpington roo as they are dual purpose.
Corina: In general I think chicken tractors are fabulous, but honestly our main reason for getting chickens is to help keep the tick population down. We’re not even eating eggs right now! It’s all a little ridiculous. Anyhow, I want them covering as much ground as possible each day. And yes, I know with that being our goal we should have gotten guinea fowl, and we might yet, but we didn’t want to deal with the noise right now.
Michelle: Yeah, I know. Really I do. I’ve just been refusing to admit it. Until I hear crowing I’m hanging on to the theory that they are just a little butch.
Elijah has some theory about training one or both of them for showing at 4H events. I don’t know, but I figure I’ve got enough on my plate, so I’m going to let him figure it out!