UpCycling Chicken Feed Bags

What do you do with used chicken feed bags?

Here's what I've done.

They make excellent grocery bags. If you leave the diameter alone (as I do), then they'll be big grocery bags, but grocery bags are smaller than is completely useful anyway.

And the "fabric" is stiff enough that you can sew a box for your industrial size spools of thread.

Works pretty well.

I used a standard sewing machine, with regular needles and regular thread. I needed to be careful, particularly with hemming the top, but in the end, it worked just fine.

These are "quick & dirty" sewing, which is my specialty. I wouldn't want to sell these at the local farmer's market. But they hold groceries great. They make use of empty feed bags great. And they certainly are unique!

Upgrades to the Chicken Yard

The previous chicken fencing was working fairly well, but a couple of the chickens would regularly get out over the 40" webbing.

 

Comment: The Leghorn named Clueless by my niece who raised her from an egg is easily the most curious bird I've ever met. And she's one of the smartest. So much for living up to your name.

 

Besides, the plastic fencing was designed to be temporary. It was time for a more permanent fence. In addition, there was some territory behind the chicken yard that was pretty well lost to us, so we just incorporated it in the new chicken yard.

 

We replaced the green plastic held up with rebar poles with real chicken wire, held up with real 4x4 posts.

 

I still don't have a "real" gate: for a temporary gate, I'm just using a 60" length of the plastic fencing, turned sideways, and stretched between nails on the post and nails on the compost bit. But I've set it up so that the chickens can have access to all three bins of the compost pile, or just to the first two bins. That gives me some freedom to dump things in there without having to worry about pushing them out of the way.

 

Once we finished the fence, I needed to modify it so the handle to the girls' door would still work. Discovered it when I was trying to put them to bed, and needed to fix it in the dark.

 

Added some stepping stones in front as well.

 

 

 

 

Experiment in a Chicken Run

We rather enjoy raising chickens. They’re a great deal of fun, and they make interesting noises. Besides, the eggs are yummy, and the really help the compost!

But we don’t like keeping them “cooped up.” So we let them out rather a lot. As a result, we have little compost-y chicken offerings all over the back yard, and we need to constantly police them: they aren’t allowed on the back patio, or in the herb gardens, or in the vegetable garden. They do NOT police themselves! Nobody relaxes when the chickens are out.

So I had the idea of putting up a fence and making a chicken run.

First I sketched it out. Yeah, ugly, I know, but pretty good for a cell phone!

This short piece of fence reaches from the coop to the compost bin.

This longer piece of fence reaches from the other side of the coop to the fence.

This is the temporary (experimental) version of the first fence: from the coop to the compost bin.

If this works out, I imagine a gate here, next to the coop. I also imagine much better fencing, more in line with the coop's construction. 

And this is how the other side came out: Room for the door to open, which also works pretty for herding them back home after their play time.

Two [now Three] Small Upgrades to the Coop

It was a sunny and cold day today. It seemed like the right time to add a couple upgrades to the coop that I've been wanting to add.

First: a shelf in the unused space above their roosts to hold their food. One bin for chicken food (that's the blue one), and one for chicken scratch.

I was also concerned about the south side of the coop: that's where all the storms come from, and it was wide open, so it got really wet on those very common rainy days.

So I just sealed up the south side, or most of it.

We'll see how well this works. If I need to add more later, we can do that!

The ladies don't seem overwhelmed so far.

UPDATE 2/23/2014: Added a partial wall to the west side of the coop.

The shelf board was veneer over particle board, and the rain was not doing it any favors. Besides, there's no need for rain to get to the feed or the scratch. So I buttoned up the end.

Needed top make sure the boards were level. Did you know you can do anything with a phone nowadays?

Greenhouse in the Snow

Snowed about 3 inches this evening. I couldn't help but notice the beauty!

The chickens' Christmas lights look real pretty in the snow! (Yeah, it's February; they still haven't taken the lights down yet. Tonight, it was worthwhile!)

I couldn't tell how the garden was doing in the snow.

The next morning, the girls were great, but confused. They were squawking, wanting out. So I let them out. They ran out, paused, and rushed back inside! It was hilarious!

Dose Day for the Ladies

The chickens got roundworm. We let them out a lot, so who knows who they got it from.

Today we dosed them. I don't know what with. Milady works for a veterinarian who specializes in birds, and who has several dozen chickens on his property at home. We trusted whatever he gave us.

We caught them, one by one, coming out of the coop (they love coming out of the coop!). I held 'em, and held their beak open; milady squeezed the syringe in, and we let 'em go. Came back and gave 'em mealworms as a treat for being good chickens. 

But we can't eat their eggs for a month. February 20th or so, we get eggs again.

Sad.

Half an Egg

The chickens surprised me today. Instead of the usual 4 or 5 eggs, they gave us 4½ eggs.

One was a tiny little thing, about the size of a yolk only.

The all-knowing Interwebs educated me: 

“Tiny or miniature size eggs in standard size hens are the natural result when a small bit of reproductive tissue or other small foreign mass enters the hen’s oviduct and triggers the regular formation of an egg.

Inside the hen’s body the bit of tissue is treated exactly like a normal yolk and is swathed and enveloped in albumen, membranes and a shell and is eventually passed from the hen’s body. When it is laid it looks just like a regular chicken egg except that it is very little and teeny.”

I haven't opened it, but I'm told to expect all egg white, and no yolk.

The Ladies Get In the Christmas Mood

So the weather here has been pretty darned cold: it hasn't gotten above 40º in a couple of weeks that I’ve noticed.

And it’s been cold – real cold – at night. Last night was 12º!

We’ve put an incandescent lamp in the chickens’ coop, and have taken to leaving it on all night, at least during this cold snap.

And milady has been feeding them warm stuff in the mornings (oatmeal, leftover rice and stuff) when she breaks the ice out of their water pot in the morning. I gotta admit that sounds somewhat excessive, but she sees them as people, not farm animals, so who am I to argue?

So as long as we’re treating the chickens like people, I figured we ought help them out with getting in the Christmas spirit! I'm not sure they need it; they're still giving us 4 or so eggs a day!

We have other lights on the back porch, and those are the only Christmas lights we've put up this year.

A New Compost Bin

 
So we've had these two tiny compost bins. They're tidy, and they're cute, but they're small! They've  been full since the middle of summer, and we're just getting into the heart of the compost season.

And now we have chickens!

Chickens generate a really substantial amount of compost. We use pine shavings in the coop and the nest boxes themselves, and we put straw on the ground of the run underneath.

And chickens poop all over the place, so we change the pine shavings out weekly, and the straw out pretty consistently.

Our tidy, tiny, cute little compost bins have been completely overwhelmed by the amount of compost from the garden and the lawn and the chickens and the landscape trimmings and whatever else we've thrown at them.

So we have started another compost bin. You can see that it's not the least "cute" and while it's tiny by the standards of some farmers I have known, it's big enough to handle what we're going to throw at it.

Yep, it's just three pallets screwed together. I've been adding (and will continue to add) some better siding where it's kind of thin, but we're excited about the increased capacity.

And it will be so much easier to turn the compost as it ripens. That will be really nice.

As it fills up, we'll add something across the front if it turns out we need it: cedar fence boards are cheap and probably sufficient. Or a piece of another pallet. 

And we're expecting a whole lot more compost to be ready for the gardens come spring!

The Chicken Tractor Comes of Age

Early this spring, I posted about a chicken tractor I built, and then I introduced the three ladies who will live there, who eventually grew to five.

That proved to be a non-winning idea:

• The tractor was built for 3 hens, and we discovered we could have 5. 
• The tractor needed to be moved weekly, or actually, on a lawn, twice weekly, and still it chewed up the lawn where they were parked. 
• It proved more difficult to move than planned for. That may come from my poropensity to over-build things.
• We needed to lock them in every night, and sometimes we forgot to do that. 
• Feeding and watering them was rather a lot of work. It always involved dirty knees. 

So we built a real chicken coop.  The ladies like it better, it's better protection, we don't need to lock them up every night (the entire coop is secure), and best of all, my lady likes it. She thinks it's pretty.

But the original tractor was still available.

It had been designed to fit inside one of the garden's raised beds.

The plan was to turn the chickens loose to both fertilize and weed the space, and we only need to pay them (literally) chicken feed.

So today, we installed the tractor into the garden, and installed the two leghorns in it.

We fenced in the rest of the raised bed, and put a lid on it (leghorns actually fly fairly well. So do chicken hawks, which can find a couple of leghorns really inviting. 

And they immediately got busy digging out the muchies. And cleaning up the garden at the same time.

Happy chickens.

Ready for an Omlette

There's not much better than coming home to this every afternoon.

These ladies are hard working girls!

Morning & afternoon, I give them scraps from the garden. Special occasions (barbecues?) gets them scraps from the table.

Other than that, it's just chicken feed & water.

And who knew how affectionate chickens could be? Weird, eh?

Special Ed Chicken

This is a special ed chicken.

Her name used to be "Lady Lazarus" because she was literally raised from the dead. She and her sisters had died from a cold snap when they were tiny chicks. The girl raising them brought this one back from the great chicken coop in the sky.

So her name is still Lazzie, but we have dubbed her Dingus. She is something special.

She won't fly up to the perches just over her head. We know that she can because she regularly flew over the 4' high fence around their play yard. But she won't. We suspect that she may be insecure: she is the last one to try new things.

So I made her a special perch, only a foot off the floor. But she won't even get up on this tiny little thing. I have to put her up here every night, and she squawks and fusses when her feet are off the ground. (Her sisters love to be picked up and petted.)

We think that when she was dead, she must have sustained some damage to her little pea brain.

Our First Egg!

Last night was their first night in the new diggs.

This morning, I'm presented with this.

The ironic part is that they were fighting over who gets to sleep in the nest boxes (my answer: they're not for sleeping!), and she let it go from her place on the perch. It's dented on one end.

But it's our first egg!

Building a Chicken Coop

So we haven't been impressed with the suburban use of a tiny little chicken tractor. It houses them just fine, but it's a bear - and this is more because of the way I made it than the idea of a tractor - to fill the food and water.

When we added a couple more chickens, we realized it's time for a real chicken coop.

So this is the place where we're going to build the coop. We're clearing space in what was once a fairly unruly garden.

Laying out bricks for a foundation. These were part of our fireplace at one time.


























While Milady was preparing the area and laying out the foundation, I was building the base of the coop.

First: I laid out the perimeter with treated 2x4s. These will set on top of the bricks. 

I reinforced the corners.




Then I installed treated 2x4s vertically on the perimeter.











Here's a close-up of the corner's construction.

And the wooden base installed on top of the brick foundation.

If you look closely, you'll see a layer of chicken wire dangling from the bottom of this base.

Here's the closeup: the chicken wire was about 12" wide. We buried it in the dirt around the coop. This is designed to discourage whatever creatures wish to dig under the foundation to get at the Ladies.

Then we set up the studs.

The orange gizmo is a level to help me identify "vertical." It doesn't go there automatically.

Getting a start on the frame for the roof.










We're planning an exit on the end, under the coop itself, to let the chickens in and out. We have odd ideas for this, involving a "chicken tunnel" to another area for them to roam.

Getting the screen up under the coop. Milady does details so much better than I.











 And we have a roof up.

First wall is up.

Time to make a floor.

A good floor will be easy to clean. For this coop, that means linoleum. I've glued it on, and now I'm applying pressure the best way I know how.

Nicest linoleum floor around. Nicest floor in a chicken coop we know of.

There is a drawback. We've since found out that if they're tweaking out about something, then the pine shavings on the linoleum is awfully slippery. Several of them fell on their feathered little kiesters when they first arrived.

It was really funny, actually. I tried not to laugh. I failed.

Second wall is up. This one has the nesting boxes sticking out.

Nesting boxes protruding out of the coop is traditional for a couple of reasons:

• It keeps the birds from roosting (and pooping) on the nests or nesting boxes.
• It makes it much easier to get at the eggs: don't have to go into the coop. 
• It looks kind of cool.

Nest boxes will get a divider and a lid soon.

Got a lid on the nest box. Had an inspiration to seal the joint with a piece of innertube.

Looks kind of glorious here, doesn't it? 

And got the inside wall finished. Got a door for chickens. Studies have shown that chickens like doors.

Time for a door. The best way is to make our own.

Beginning to hang the door. Actually, the door is hung, but there is not yet a door frame. That's next.

Now we need a cleanout door on the back of the coop. We wanted the boards to match the rest of the wall, so we built the entire wall, and then cut the door out.

The semi-final coop. "Semi" only because there are some details I need to finish, but the Ladies moved in this afternoon.

Whew!

The old coop, withe the pen now removed, looks a little forlorn.

Since it fits the raised beds, we might use it for a "mobile office" for the Ladies in the off-season.

Or we might sell it next spring and "re-coop" some of the costs of building the big one.

Needed to block the nest boxes off. They were fighting over who got to sleep there.

"No, girls. Those are for laying eggs, not for sleeping and pooping in."

So we needed to pick up the ladies and set them upon the roosts for the first night. They squawked (like chickens!) when we lifted them up, but they seemed to like it up there.