Hoop coop/Winter quarters

[raf]

Here are pictures of the winter quarters for our place. Along the left wall are 7 rabbit pens, suspended above are 2 5 gallon buckets with a nipple plumbed to each pen.
In the middle are 3 pens with the same water arrangement. The hanging bucket about knee level is a demand feeder for the chickens/ducks, when they peck at the bowl it moves and causes more feed to fall into the bowl. I've found that they're eating half of what the use to, they prefer the quail feed (28% protein) and the quail are bad to knock feed out so the chickens are cleaning that up. 
On the right wall are a quail grow-out pen and 4 breeder pens that are egg roll out.
On the front wall is a 4 hole nest box, the eggs roll to the outside of the hoop coop.
Outside on the stand is the water to supply the chicken/duck water which has a float valve.
I also have a chunnel (chicken tunnel) with a guillotine gate to let the chickens/ducks out into the goat pen.
The goats & a lamb are housed indoors right now (they're my youngest 4-H project).

It's a bit of a mess due to me storing all the chicken & rabbit tractor equipment in the hoop coop. It needs to be protected from the weather but I don't have the storage space to keep it elsewhere.

When Spring gets a little closer I'll hatch more eggs to fill the tractors but I don't overwinter many, just to keep the feed down a bit.

Hopefully there's some ideas or inspiration for even better ideas. I'd love to see/hear them, no telling what kind of improvements could be made with multiple trains of thought focused on it.

[Deleted]

Boy, that got me thinking.   Thanks for the peek, raf.  That feeder is brilliant and the whole lit my brain on fire.  So many ideas.   You really did a good job on this setup,especially the wire work. 

I can't stop thinking.  The neighbor's lot is a bit of a flood zone. There is a tremendous snake population.  I'm wondering how to snake proof a chicken tractor with this hoop and tin setup.  Smaller wire mesh?  

[raf]

I would think a smaller mesh would exclude most snakes, they still seem to find their way in. I feel like one of the most effective deterrents is not giving them a place to hide. In the Spring we'll mive everything to the tractors and gather all the materials off the ground. We still have 1-2 Cane Break Rattlesnakes each year, for us it's expected living on the river near large cane breaks, in the breaks there are large populations of pack rats so we try to let the snakes be as long as they don't take up residence.

[Deleted]

I totally get you on that.  After my bin had been up for a year, we got sloppy and didn't move the horse feed bags (with leaves) away from it.  Then, one day, we moved them and three beautiful beautiful 4 ft rat snakes slithered off.   They've always done well keeping the mice population under the house down until my dog came along and ran them off of its perimeter. 

SO, now I must rethink everything.  No permanent composting in the chicken run.  It would be too much of a magnet.  

This also eliminates Bantams.  Need big cheekens that look at snakes for lunch. 

No rattlers here! (Nor deer)

[heavyhitterokra]

I'm with raf, probably the best way to keep snakes at bay is to not provide them with any place to hide.

Smaller mesh wire might help to keep them out, but they always seem to find a way through despite the tighter mesh.

I remember going out after dark one night to close the henhouse door. There is a tin roofed chick run built out back of the henhouse that is 3' feet wide by 10' feet long, covered in wire, with sheet metal stood lengthwise all around, to help block the wind.  The chick run is only about 4' or 5' feet tall under the rafters, so I have to duck my head down low to go inside.

When I shined my light in there, I noticed there were eggs strewn all over the place. There had been a hen in there, setting on a clutch of eggs for about two weeks at the time, so I thought it strange to see her eggs scattered all about and her still there on the nest.

Feeling sorry for her, I went around back, opened the door, stooped down low to get inside, and began gathering her eggs to put them back in under her. When I had gathered a load too large to hold them all in one hand, I reached in under the hen, to lift her up, to place the eggs back inside her nest (which was built flat on the ground). To my great surprise, there was more than just chicken legs under that poor chicken! While feeling around for something to lift her by, I grabbed ahold of a big, fat, black snake about 5' feet long that had curled itself up under her, wrapping its long, slithery, body around her legs, to keep itself warm!

After screaming like a girl and scaring the poor hen half out of her wits, I discovered the sheet metal and tight wire may not have been such a great idea.  Since I had done such a good job of building the chick run so tight, the warmed up, and very aggressive snake had no way to escape!

The hen had built her nest against the back wall of this narrow chick run, as far back in the corner as she could get, so after the snake had attempted to climb the wooden wall behind the hen's nest, there was no where left for it to go, except right between my feet! The chick run isn't tall enough to stand up inside of, so I was crouched down, with my face way too close to where that snake was headed in a big hurry! 

After beating myself half to death, trying to get out of the way, I finally found a way to kill the snake.  I don't remember what I did to kill it, (if it was half as startled as I was, it might have died of a heart attack?) but I remember being almost too weak in the knees after that, to go back and help the mama chicken get her nest back together.

Sometimes, small mesh wire is not such a great idea ...  

[Deleted]

LOL !!  Had me laughing out loud, literally.  

Every time I start thinking about getting chickens, the task seems so arduous I become mentally exhausted and give up on it.  

I think I'll do tight wire on the small tractor, but the my best idea is to run chicken wire along the bottom of the chain link fence, and run some throug half the portion of the yard cutting off a section for free range, build a small fortress as a coop and deal with the rest as I go.  

I'm guessing chickens  are mostly capable of running for cover?   I guess I'll find out.  

[heavyhitterokra]

I don't think I'll ever go very long without chickens around here, though I've lost more than one flock to dogs, coyotes, hawks, possums, coons, and snakes. Even though it sometimes requires building a near fortress in order to keep them, I get so much enjoyment out of caring for them that I think all the effort is well worth the feeling of 'home' that I get from gathering eggs and feeding them daily.

Hang in there Bon! If you're anything like me, God just made you with an innate need to care for and nurture things. Whatever you have to do, it will most likely be worth it in the end.

[Deleted]

I really want pet chickens!   I suppose when the time is right, it'll happen.  I'm just not ready.  Not at all.  You know how women just grab animals and go and wing it along the way?  I really want to do that, but I'm too old and I know better.  ha  

The rabbitry is being shored up and I'm learning the extent of my capacity.  Even Bill was like "order more wire and build more cages" but I cannot.   Six active main breeders is pushing the envelope for my physical capacity and I havent' even finished building cages for all these yet.  I find this very interesting because I have an inner nudge to put all the main breeders under lock and key inside the shed.  6 is its capacity.  And 6 is my own personal physical capacity.  More than 6 will put many outside which is, mostly, a no-go.  Retired and pet rabbits outside are okay.  For that I have a few extra cages from the dynamics of a swelling rabbitry beneath breeding capacity.  It would break my heart for someone to steal old Momma Doe, but I could live without her.

I have one litter of ten that are ripping through feed and water on a massive scale.  Two more litters are coming up in succession starting at about 2 weeks from now.  when I have two growing litters at 3weeks and up, it really has me hopping.  

To wit, we are going to buy even more water bottles, soon.  I might eventually put slots for double feeders on all the kit cages, too.  

It's like, I intuitively know that the rabbits are not at maximum care, yet.  Adding another group of animals means the first will suffer and perhaps never reach that maximum security, health and thrive.  Does that make sense?  I've never been in this position before.  

Things are better, but not yet complete.  We built one rack for a step of 3 cages and will build one more.   I continually consider increasing the air flow and am reminded of what you wrote.  To paraphrase, "Tweak it and see."  I haven't made that step yet, but with stack cages I know I cannot put it off any longer.  

Adding chickens also means a massive and huge change to the ecology even if only a few.  We only have a back yard, albeit a decent sized one.  It takes time for the ecology to react and adapt to the changes.  Chickens would be like a tornado on a population that is unready to withstand.  I cannot imagine what type of bug storms or drought storms I would endure, not to mention the general destructive behavior of scratching chickens.   If I had a good size plot, yeah.  No problemo!   Here, it is delicate.

Something tells me that when I get more perrenials and more biomass from the garden it will be easier to manage chickens.

That being said, rabbits are phenomal for me.  They input more than they take out.
____
The kids have been a tremendous help.  And it's been so much fun like the morning my daughter refused to get out of bed an I dumped a basket full of 3 week old baby bunnies on top of her.  

Today, I was napping.  I live in so much pain the kids walk on eggshells when I'm resting lest they wake me up and I growl.  But my son woke me up today to reveal a really cute black bunny hovering over me.  So awesome.  Such goodness.  

I think what I'm trying to say is the Good Lord has given me the sense to follow through before moving on and the discipline is agonizing. Trying to make sense of it is quite the experience and helps me understand things.


Why Lord? Why no cheekens?  Me want Cheekens now!!   hehe  

[heavyhitterokra]

Quote from Bon's previous post, "It's like, I intuitively know that the rabbits are not at maximum care, yet. Adding another group of animals means the first will suffer and perhaps never reach that maximum security, health and thrive. Does that make sense? I've never been in this position before."

Bon, to me, that makes perfect sense.  I love your passion for that which you strive to protect and your philosophy toward caring for your livestock.  That shows much desirable character.  I know you always have the animal's best interest at heart.  I salute you for the well thought out ambition in your life's approach to all the things you do so well.

And although chickens are easier to care for than rabbits, they are very destructive to a garden or any bedded plants. Our chickens free-range, but we have 5 acres for them to run on, and my garden is at the opposite corner as the henhouse, so they don't venture that far away very often.

I have a few photos of the little henhouse I built out here for them, along with the chick run attached.  I built the henhouse from an old dairy barn that was blown down by a tornado in 2008.  I Built the chick run from an old school sign that was blown over in another storm, so it was all salvaged lumber and used tin. (The best kind). It might look a little bent up around the edges, but everyone of those dings were well earned and it is deserving of its character. 

I close the little chicken door every night to keep out predators. I only open the big door to gather eggs or to clean it out.  I leave the big door closed and the little chicken door open during the daytime, to keep out dogs. The chickens can run in there to hide if they think of it in time. (They don't always think of it in time).
I keep about 10 chickens, so my henhouse is only about four times the size of my outhouse in depth.

Snake gun, square nose shovel, and snake machete at the ready.

Little chicken door that slides on a dado routed into a treated 2x2. 

The little  chicken door is closed every night.

Chick run is 3' feet wide by 10' feet long with sheet metal to block wind. The door is only 4' feet tall, so I can duck inside to tend chicks.  There is a small, raised chicken door between the two enclosures so hens can go to feed while raising brood.

Moss always grows on the North side of a henhouse, so if I'm ever lost in the yard, I can find my way back home. 


This is my outhouse.  I built this about thirty-years ago, using lumber from the old house I lived in the first time that I married, back in 1982. The old house was a Corps of Engineer's line shack that was moved away from Fort Gibson Lake in 1949.  Who knows when it was built?  Someone just moved it out of the flood plane the summer the dam was completed (June 1949).  It was a three room shack with one light bulb in each room for reading, and a woodstove in the center room.  It was 14' feet wide by 45' feet long with a tin roof and no insulation.  There was no indoor plumbing there, save for an old Lion's foot bath tub, that was hand filled by carrying water from the well to the woodstove in the kitchen, then Back to the bathtub.. I lived there for eight years, then my brother bought it from me and tore it down and reused the lumber for other projects.  That makes this lumber about 70 or 80 years old.  They don't make it to last like that nowadays.  This thing has had amazing durability.  I moved it here from our second house, in 2004 when we moved from Hulbert to Moodys.  We had 4 kids at the time and only one bathroom, so it sure came in handy over the years.  

The old door handle on my outhouse is carved from a sassafras root.  My henhouse door handle is carved from oak.  In the country, you use whatever you can find and just make do with it, using homemade hardware adds a certain amount of charm as far as I can tell.  All the door hardware and even the hooked latch was hand wrought with hammered Irion using a hand operated forge a, hammer and anvil that I have out here.

We build quite a bit of our own stuff ourselves.  We have a welder, chisels, saws, plains, grinders files, nails, sawmill oak lumber, old tin, and lots of rocks to work with.

We even built our own bridge to cross the little creek leading to our chicken house and garden.  The little foot bridge is about 30' feet long.




The 30' foot footbridge to cross the shallow creek, leading to our henhouse, goose enclosure, berry patch, vineyard, pawpaw patch, apple orchard, and garden.

The henhouse, from the rail of the little footbridge.

Footbridge in November snow flurries.
snow.

[Deleted]

Ron, that chicken coop is so adorb !!!  It has such character, ya know?  Makes me giggle.  Give me encouragement.  I have a lot of materials that I can repurpose.  And, in fact, they came out of the 100 yo house.  Durable stuff. They just don't make them like they used to. 

[heavyhitterokra]

Bon,

We all need encouragement.  I love looking at the photos others post here.  All great ideas!

I like building things out of used lumber and used tin. I used to try to build one item like that per year, it would take me about a year to gather the materials once I had an idea of what I wanted to build. (Getting the idea is the hardest part). Once you have an idea, you can start cruising salvage yards, junk piles, and the second hand stores.  All those little projects like that chicken house or that footbridge really add up over the years and don't cost all that much to build.

If you ever get discouraged, just price one of those buildings, prefabricated at the lumber yard. They are made of the cheapest materials and are priced higher than a cat's back!

Raf's hoop coop is a really good example of what a person can accomplish by using repurposed materials. I love those photos he posted!

[macmex]

Speaking of old wood and salvaging to reuse it; here's a picture I took of Brother Juan, back around 1998, in a little village called Cerro Prieto, in the Mexican state of Hidalgo. This is a place where the local folk earn some money raising and selling Chile Rayado. I visited it a good many times. They were about 2 hours from the Bible Institute, where I taught, and often requested pulpit supply or more often... that we bring a projector and a movie. This was the patriarch of the community. I believe Juan was about 80 years old. Most of the houses around his own, belonged to children and grand children (and spouses). They were on a high ridge and could look down on the tops of some other peaks, many of which had dwellings on them.




I took this picture of him when he invited me for a meal. Not pictured, was his wife, who was bustling around the kitchen, making tortillas and serving the most delicious food. At this time Juan had just explained that he and his wife had lived in the same house for their whole marriage, and I'm guessing they married before the age of 20. When they were getting married Juan learned that several miles away was an abandoned house available, so he dismantled it, hauling the wood home over snaking mountain trails, using his mule. Then he built his present house. Of course, he added to the house with time, but the timbers you see are those original pieces he hauled home so long ago. He reckoned that the abandoned house was 50 years old when he dismantled it, so they were over 100 years old. They were blackened by decades of smoke from their cooking fire.

Juan impressed me for his work ethic and frugality, but most of all for his love of Jesus Christ. No one got into a conversation with Juan without hearing about Jesus. He and his wife still lived very humbly. His prized possession was an old battery operated MEGAPHONE. You see, part of his house had a flat cement roof and it sat on the crest of a very high ridge, overlooking miles of mountainous country and several small villages. Every day Juan would climb up on his roof and PREACH the gospel to those hills and everyone in them! 



I doubt that Juan had even a grade school education. He could barely read, yet he was such a strikingly good steward of what God had given him.
Now, so many years later, I can't imagine that he and his wife are still living, but I'm sure the ministry goes on. Bet if I visited now, someone could still reach over and grab Juan's megaphone from off a hook and proudly tell the story of the patriarch of Cerro Prieto.

“And all these, having obtained a good testimony through faith, did not receive the promise, God having provided something better for us, that they should not be made perfect apart from us. Therefore we also, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which so easily ensnares [us], and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of [our] faith, who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.” Hebrews 11:39-12:2   

[heavyhitterokra]

Thanks, for adding those photos, George. That was a great story! Thanks, for sharing those wonderful memories too.

The photo of the hills in Mexico, and your story of Brother Juan, reminds me of my great-grandpa, who was a Circuit Baptist Preacher, born in 1896. He'd make his rounds on the back of a mule to country Churches around Shady Grove, Lost City, Peggs, Spring Valley, Money Bean Hollow, and the like.

He used to take me wolf hunting with him when I was just a small boy. I never saw him kill or harm one in any way; he'd use the opportunity to preach around campfires and traverse the hills with old coon hunters. I remember many a night, sleeping with him on a wool blanket, spread across a piece of plywood, in the back of a wooden stock-rack, in the back of his '55 Chevy pickup truck.  He could spin yarns with the best of them!

He had a homemade hearing aid, to help him track the sound of his dogs running.  It was just a funnel with a copper tube soldered to an ear piece.  He'd hold that out the window of the truck and listen intently as the dogs ran.  Then, he'd drive on ahead of them on the dirt roads and sit there in the dark, waiting for the wolf to cross the road in front of his truck.  It was his goal in life just to be able to outsmart one it seemed.  We'd sit sometimes for what seemed like hours, just so he could flash his headlights as the pack crossed the road in front of us, Saying,"Gotcha!"

I can remember him out in his garden, listening to the old AM band radio preachers on his pocket transistor radio, just like it was yesterday.  He'd listen to the old-time preachers that way, while working on his next Sunday sermon.  He had some kind of kidney trouble and couldn't even eat a tomato, but he'd grow them by the bushel basket load to give away to people he met along the way.  I remember sitting in the back of his old truck, eating on a whole gunny sack full of cantaloupes that he brought with him to share around as he preached.

Some of my best memories since we moved to Moodys, are of Bill Trammel driving the dirt roads around here with a team of mules and a wagon load of garden produce, to give away to anyone we happened to pass along the way.  By the time we ran out of veggies, there'd be half a dozen kids riding on the back of the wagon, eating tomatoes and stuffing green beans and ears of corn into a sack to take home to their moms.  Bill was no preacher; he was just carrying on the old traditions he had observed from childhood as the old circuit preachers used to do.  That's how they'd get up a crowd on a Saturday evening, hoping for follow-through on a Sunday morning.


I'll just bet, if we had a mind to, George and I could do something similar along the lines of those old guys, by putting our tractors to good use hauling produce along the roads around here again someday.   

[heavyhitterokra]

Cinder Block Chicken Water Warmer.

After all the years of hand-carrying water to the chickens, I finally built a cinder block water warmer today.

I had an old chick starting heat-lamp hanging out in the barn. There was a ceramic light socket already inside there. All I had to do was take the aluminum shade and the bail off of it and place the ceramic socket down inside the webbing of a cinder block. I swiped a concrete paver from my summertime charcoal grilling spot, to place over the opening in the cinder block and I was in business!

What took me all these years to finally do that?

I suppose it may have been the fact that it has been several years since it got cold enough around here to freeze my water buckets all the way to the bottom, or more likely, I was just too lazy to go looking for enough parts to do it ...

Now, I just place a shallow pan full of water on top of the concrete patio paver and let the 60 watt light bulb inside do its magic!

I would have posted a photo, but it was after dark before I came back inside.

[macmex]

That's really ingenious Ron!