New Chicks, New Pen

The  day old chicks I ordered from Mt Healthy Hatchery  were mailed April 4th  and I was ready for them.  I had ordered 25 Araucanas (the ones that lay blue/green eggs) and 25 Golden Comet (for big brown eggs) pullets to supplement my old laying hens  and they are including 25 free heavy breed roosters.

I figure I may as well grow my own chicken to eat. It is bound to be healthier than store bought.

A couple of weeks in advance I set up the two small bitty pens I use out in the barn with brooder lamps, waterers and feeders and fresh hay on the wire floors. When the bitties arrived I split them into two groups, each with a Mama lightbulb. It was still getting below freezing at night so I stapled plastic up partway on the sides and opened it some on warmer days.

Then I started working on the rest of the barn. I had to tear off the 6 mil plastic I had stapled up for snowstorm Jonas this winter. It really helped to keep the wind and snow out of the barn and Mara and the chickens were much warmer and dryer than they would have been without it.

This photo was earlier this winter after the Jonas storm.

A couple of years ago I built a new metal roof over my chicken pen with three clear panels for sunlight. I was supposed to finish the job by taking down the outside chicken wire wall and ceiling and instead extending the wire all the way up to the roof. The roof was originally eight feet tall and made of flat chicken wire. Since I now have some time at home, being unemployed since January, I am finally going to complete this job.

At the same time, I also needed to do the entire spring barn cleaning   and haul the mostly composted chicken manure to the garden.

It  has always been a little difficult to get to the inside of the chicken house because the doors into the yard and the door into the interior roost are both narrow. I remedied this by demolishing a wall between the chickens and a storage room, which has a nice big door. I turned this added space into new roosting, feeding and laying quarters for the laying hens.

I recently bought and set up two 160 foot rolls of electric poultry netting from Premier so my hens would be safe from our outrageous foxes when I am not here to watch them.

I had also cut them a little chicken door to get outside. All of this was dirty work and required a mask.

So, after the laying hens were all re-situated, I tore down all the old wire, pulling out each and every staple and piling up any reusable wood.

I had saved some super heavy duty, expanded metal mesh from some old greenhouse bench tops to use on the lower half of the new run. The upper portion of wire is heavy gauge, green painted, tennis court wire which I salvaged from a garden client many years ago. It was old when I got it, having been used to fence in a wooden floored tennis court that I think may have been made in the 1950’s. It is still going strong. I have  also been using some green painted lumber from that same tennis court, along with two doors.

I built a travois looking roost in the new pen.

It took me about three days just to do the demo and cleanup, then another three to build it back. It looks so much better now and I built  a cleanout door into the covered run as well, so it will be easier to clean next time.

The chicks are three weeks old in this photo and have just been moved into the big pen from their little cages. They still have Mama lightbulb and a nest box though.

And yes, I finally broke down and brought home three baby ducks from the feed store too. I resisted for years.

All the babies are growing, although I am now in the process of dealing with a rat problem that I did not realize I had. I also had no idea that a rat would eat a baby chick. Now I know and things are getting buttoned up even tighter in the barn. It has never seen such cleaning. I am now digging up the dirt floors in the main part of the barn and redoing all that as well. When I get done, it will all be good. This is one of those jobs that had been put off for all those years I was working too hard for somebody else. Now, it gets done right.

-Wendy lee, writing at Edgewisewoods