Friday, July 17, 2009

Chicken?


Nope! We are not chicken of chickens. We've got three--Sunny, Diamond and Shadow.

We should all be a little spooked by Shadow since she is not as social as the others, but overall, she's a sweetie.

We love our girls, we love our coop (which we built ourselves--over three long hammer filled days where I swore like a sailor).

For those urban farmers who are turning to home raised chickens, I decided to post photos of our birds and coop and to tell where we got the plans.

What we have here is a Playhouse Chicken Coop ). It comes from a building in Wisconsin who will sell you the plans for $35.00 on line (go to youtube.com/watch?v=ULvlZ94aZN4 to see the video by the designer).

We took his cut list to Mr. Plywood and they put the entire supply list together for us. Then we set aside three days and built, built, scratched our heads, wrote emails to the designer, watched his video 60 times and then built a little more. He advised (likely tired of my questions), to just use our intuition and not worry too much.


It's not perfect but it turned out pretty darned nice. The girls stay in all day, everyday, they are not free range. They put themselves in the hen house at night and we shut the door to keep them safe from preditors. It's been five months and we're expecting eggs any day. Urban chickens feels so good, the girls eat all our extra bread and veggies. They love strawberry tops and watermelon rinds. We sit and watch them for hours at a time. They are always up to something.

The cost of the entire set up was not inexpensive but this is because we turned our list over to the guys at Mr. Plywood. The got us everything we needed but honesty, we could have saved with lower grade, used lumber. I believe we spent upwards to $350.00. Ouch. But like the great poet Baron Wormser says, "it's never been economical to be human!"

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