Category: Chickens

How to Build a Chicken Shanty with Cattle Panels

Build, Chickens

We had to build this chicken shelter out at the Green House when we were sure we had a rooster in our flock of ‘pullets’. I already had the fence, metal roofing and hardware cloth. I just had to buy $3 worth of wire, so the project was nearly free for me. I wouldn’t recommend you go buy these materials to make this because it isn’t a pleasure to behold and because it can’t carry you through winter needs (at least not Zone 5 Winter needs). However, if you need warm weather shelter in a hurry, this was a fun, fast build that could be streamlined.

Using ratcheting strapping I was able to bend cattle panels by myself into arches and hold them in that position while attaching scrap boards with metal ‘strapping’. The two cattle panels were then wired to each other and scrap metal roofing put on tilted to the West to help shield from the sun in the summer but encouraging lots of airflow which is crucial for chickens. The very top was covered to provide rain protection from Thunderstorms.

The arch shape creates a perfectly matching grid of strong metal that makes it easy to support a 2″x3″ across as a roost. At first the hens didn’t want to leave the ground at all, but eventually they found the very top roost even though it was a bit of a tight fit.

At this point the structure began to get very heavy to move. I’m unable to drag two cattle panels across the bumpy ground because of all the surface area and chances for it to snag on a rock or tree. I was able to stand inside the arch and lift the entire structure. The arch is taller than 5’6″ and 8′ wide. At my height even with my arms fully extended above my head, it barely cleared the ground and caught on every little clump of grass.

My daughter joined me in wiring hardware cloth and chicken wire onto it to make it more secure, but this proved to be largely unnecessary because hawks were deterred with simple woven hawk netting.

Once all this reinforcement was done the shelter was too heavy to be a chicken tractor (which was the original plan) but too open to be a chicken coop that could protect through the winter.

It was absolutely necessary to add a cap on the roost end to keep driving rain and the occasional chilly wind at bay. The construction crew had left behind some tarps. I wired two small scraps to the arch end and tucked them under the metal roofing. For a summer sunshade on the west side, I was able to slide the tarp between the cattle panel and hardware cloth and no additional attachments were needed.

The construction tarps worked perfectly. The white side reflected the heat of the summer sun, and the black side insured that it was truly dark on the other side. The feed bags that I had experimented with did not fair nearly as well as the heavy construction tarps. The chickens relentlessly pecked at the feed bag on the left of the large tarp and the feed bag that had been on the right didn’t last very long either. Their light coloring didn’t create deep shade and they seemed to mostly block the occasional refreshing wind. The black underside of the construction tarps made a huge difference in the shade effect, and was worth the blocked wind.

A few more boards were added to the structure as a ‘door frame’ of sorts. A simple staple gun made very quick work of securing the chicken wire to the frame. I really struggle with doors though. I don’t like making them because they tend to sag or not swing smoothly. I got lucky while trying to figure out my door problem.

Someone threw out a “baby gate” and it became the door to the chicken coop. Simply wrapping chicken wire over it made me feel more secure about it, though looking back that was probably unnecessary because there is no roost within 3 feet of the door and the electric fence keeps out everything but hawks.

Which brings us to the hawk netting. This hawk netting is very very heavy and much more visible than the lighter netting we are now using in the subdivision. I highly recommend what I have, but I can’t find the exact seller. This is the most similar netting currently out there. Each junction is knotted and the individual strands are strong and UV resistant.

You probably want less than what I bought though. I bought the 50’x50′ size and had a large coil of it left over wrapped around the entrance. I kept worrying that a mouse would set up residence in it, or chew it up for nesting material. Looks like I got lucky this year, but next year I will try hard to use the entire net and make a much larger roaming area for the hens.

Doing this makeshift project for free became almost as fun as the experiment. A simple solution for the door latch was needed that wouldn’t waste anything but that would stay solid and not be frustrating to use. I rigged this.

It’s purposely set at an angle so if a racoon were to shake the door the latch would just slide further down into the ‘locking’ position. All these little security measures I put in are funny now because it wasn’t long before I had to prop up the back corner of the shelter to give the flock more roaming space.

All that hardware cloth that is supposed to thwart racoons, opossums and dogs was lifted a foot into the air making it useless. The flock acted like the cattle panel was some sort of guillotine that was just waiting to fall on them. They would hesitate on one side and suddenly sprint under like they were cheating death. I thought I would have to build some sort of framed in door to make them feel more comfortable. The photo below is months after lifting the corner, by that time the hens were no longer afraid, just cautious.

By the end of the summer the flock had eaten all the nearby grass and went in and out any available hole. They would dust-bath in the low lying area right under the metal edge of the cattle panel. Glad I never found the time to build a special door!

I don’t recommend you build this if you have the means and time to go ahead and build an all-season coop or if you can put together a truly light chicken tractor. That said, I’m really glad I had a chance to experiment with this set-up because I discovered some things I want to include in my future chicken coop.

The first thing I wanted in this coop and all future coops is this little ‘knee wall’ that keeps the chickens from rushing the door when you bring treats. As a kid I was really afraid of chickens because they can be a bit aggressive. I still don’t like walking around them if I’m in shorts…my Barred Rocks bite me right through sports pants.

I want for myself and I hope for you: a set-up that not only makes keeping livestock less of a harassment, but also elevates it to fun. Something we can share with our kids, friends and neighbors. Being able to visit my chickens in flip-flops is fantastic. The knee-wall is the first half. The second half is to not walk where the chickens walk/roost. I don’t like tracking chicken poo around on my shoes. So the knee-wall only really works if you can hang the feeders and waterers at arms length.

You may have noticed that the chicken feeder is always hung and the waterer too. These are hung several feet from the roost so poo doesn’t get in the feed or on the waterer. They are also hung snug to the ceiling to prevent a chicken from figuring out how to roost on top of them (don’t use a horizontal board as the support for the chain). Because a chicken seems compelled to poo in it’s food, it will find a way to roost on a board with only 4″-6″ of clearance if that means it can poo in the food…I don’t know why. In time I started hanging the chicken snacks in the same way to prevent chickens from trampling every edible bit before their sisters could eat it. If you pair hanging food/water with a knee wall you can reduce walking into the coop quite a bit. Of course, then there is the egg-laying issue.

I broke my leg before finding time to think about laying boxes. I was in no condition to build something, so I compromised and bought this really large litter box, filled it with wood chips and stationed it near the coop door. There is a really expensive one on the market if you want it to look great and be too heavy to tip over. I taped up the vents on the top to keep out rain and light and the hens loved it. They very quickly adapted to it and I think they preferred it to the nesting boxes we have in the subdivision because it was so dark and private. It was big enough for two pullets to lay at once, which is good because some nesting boxes I almost purchased weren’t large enough to accommodate a single full-sized Plymouth Barred Rock.

That doesn’t mean I’ll be using a litter box in my ‘dream coop’. What I mean is that the nesting box needs to be really big for my hens. It must be accessible to the outside or at least arms length from the knee-wall. My Homesteading Hero housing the rooster and two hens this winter is finding that my hens won’t use her perfect nesting boxes any more regularly than her last hens did. She has a fantastic set-up that lets the chickens sleep inside her wonderful barn with their very own window. That window shines right into her nesting boxes. Hens like it dark and private for laying, and I wouldn’t have understood that (and a few other preferences) without my experimental chicken shanty.

Brass Egg™ participates in affiliate marketing programs, and may receive compensation when you click and purchase from links to retailers. Brass Egg™ of Russell Holdings Group, LLC 2021. All content ©2021 Russell Illinois Holdings, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

An Idea For Getting Kids Engaged With The Chickens: Leg Bands

Chickens

By far the fastest way to get farming/homesteading into your child’s heart is to let them experience baby farm animals. There is something about a baby chick, goat or pig that is irresistible. The second way is to give your child a part of farming that is all their own. A great parenting book I enjoyed constantly used examples of how his local Amish would give their children sections of their best garden space to to raise their own little garden to “gain the love of farming”. We were lucky enough to be able to combine both by giving our children their very own baby chicks.

My youngest bought me these Chicken Leg Bands for Mother’s Day. It was a lot of money for a little guy who only earns $2.50 a week at his chore. He spent more than usual because he felt a little guilty for talking me into the size 9 bands (on the left) a few weeks earlier even though I was pretty sure we needed the size 11 (on the right). In just a month’s time it was clear that the size 9 is far too tight for a Plymouth Barred Rock and the Rhode Island Reds are also more comfortable with the larger size.

Guilt wasn’t the only reason he bought the bands though….my youngest really loves knowing which two chickens are his. For the record, he has two, Midnight: a dark colored Plymouth Barred Rock hen that even as a fluffy chick was darker than all the others. The other is Wildfire: a Rhode Island Red with lots of variation in her feathers…one wing feather almost strawberry blonde and some so dark they are almost black. As a bit of insurance each child has two in case some unfortunate Racoon or Hawk incident happens.

The family business when I was a kid was raising and training German Sheppard Guard Dogs for Police Departments, Sheriff offices and personal protection. Dad was good at what he did, so waiting lists formed and people sometimes chose their puppy long before it was ready to leave the mother. Dad kept track using finger nail polish on the left front nails. This was particularly helpful for children picking out their puppy who didn’t want to wait another 2-3 weeks for it to be fully weened. It gave those children a sense of ownership.

Something more permanent is preferred when you have a flock of 9 that need to be distinguishable even as adults. There are bands for sale that allow you to number your chickens all the way to 100 in the same color so that you can make a detailed breeding plan and track egg production. However, only a few are large enough for a Plymouth Barred Rock, most are pigeon sized and all require catching the chicken in order to read the number. For a backyard flock like ours with engaging the kids being the primary objective, these colorful bands work best. Simply have a child hold the chicken while you open the ring as wide as possible and slip it over the ankle. For us it was a two-person job.

Get the correct size from the beginning so you don’t have to redo this…taking it off can cause you to accidentally scratch your hen’s leg. You could also print up a little list of hen/rooster names with their color and give one to each kid. I sealed mine in packing tape and keep in my phone case so my kids can ask any time which hen is which. My eldest’s best friend even named the last hen, so Sriracha is ‘his hen’. Engaging a 15-year-old with your flock: priceless.

Brass Egg™ participates in affiliate marketing programs, and may receive compensation when you click and purchase from links to retailers. Brass Egg™ of Russell Holdings Group, LLC 2021. All content ©2021 Russell Illinois Holdings, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

How Cold Is Too Cold For Chickens With No Electricity? 12 Tips For Success.

Chickens

Here are 11 Tips that helped my hens have survive the worst of this hard 2021 winter, plus a bonus I might use for next winter.

In mid-February, I woke up to -6 (not counting wind chill), but we had expected a low of only -2. I was afraid of what I might find this morning even though they had survived a night of -8 just a few weeks before. This cold has just dragged on and on though, with no break. The good news is that they were all alive and active this morning. The bad news is they refuse to leave the small coop even though I’ve removed all the snow from their little chunnel (chicken tunnel) and filled it with cut up vegetables and cracked corn and other chicken scratch. In four days I’ve only seen the evidence (chicken tracks) that one chicken actually left the coop when the temp got all the way up to 16 degrees. Despite them refusing to leave their little house, they’ve made it through a really tough near-blizzard Midwest winter. Here’s how:

#1 – Choose a tough breed. We did not choose a specifically cold-weather breed. We own Plymouth Barred Rocks and Rhode Island Reds which are hardy and do well in all types of weather. The plan is that the next round of chicks will be Australorps which hail from Australia and have small combs and wattles with solid black feathers. If you want to get really serious about sailing through winter though, the Chantecler would help you sleep well at night. Canada developed this chicken to survive harsh winters and avoid frost bite with ‘pea’ combs, very small wattles and big warm bodies. The Russian Orloff chicken is also incredibly cold hardy, as you would imagine, but primarily a meat bird that lays about 100 eggs a year. We have some very hot summers, so I may have to just settle for tough breeds.

#2 – Acclimate your birds through the fall and early winter. Bringing out heat lamps and closing up the coop too early is a disservice to your hens . I cover this pretty extensively in my early winter post, so I’ll just repeat that you want to add the hay and plastic coverings slowly so your chickens begin to put on their ‘winter coats’. Just like our kids eventually agree to put a jacket over a T-shirt and then graduate to parkas over sweatshirts, the chickens need a little chill to signal their feathers to puff out and begin insulating them.

#3 – Fresh Hay insulates better and keeps odors down, but nothing needs to be wasted. Move the hay through by raking the poo-laden hay in the eating and drinking area out to the chicken yard so the hens don’t have to stand directly on ice and snow. Then rake the hay out of the roosting area into the eating area. Empty all the nesting boxes into the roosting area and then finally put fresh hay in the nesting boxes. How much hay will you need? More Hay. Always more. Hay is your friend especially if you are unable to run electricity to the coop. You are not limited to putting hay inside the coop. Pile it high outside too! Why not pile it on top of the roof? Even put some along the pop door to keep cold winds from blowing in. As we went into this long stretch of negative temperatures I decided to forgo retrieving any eggs and instead filled the entire nesting box to the top with hay as insulation for the hens. This may cause me a few egg-eating problems down the road, but it’s far more important to me that the hens survive this week.

#4 – Bring on the Snow! Snow is actually an insulator when there is a layer of leaves, hay or some other dry insulator in between. Just like an igloo protects, a blanket of snow over the top of the coop and piled up at the edges creates insulation. Deep snow is better than bitter winds with no snow to slow it down or protect your roof. If you have to remove snow from the nesting box roof or other location, throw that snow up on the roof and let it go to work for you.

#5 – Small sleeping areas are a survival tactic if your house looses heat. The idea is that a whole family grabs sleeping bags and everyone camps out in one of the smaller bedrooms. If it is still too cold, a family can put up a camping tent in the middle of the small room and that will usually get a family through even blizzard-like conditions. We use a similar trick with baby chicks where the heat lamp shines down into a smallish box (with a tiny chick-sized door) at the far end of ‘chick yard’ and the food and water are at the other end. This set-up allows the baby chicks to get as warm as they would ever want to be and then leave to cool down, get a drink, eat a little and play. The option of different temperatures allows the baby chicks to acclimate to colder temperatures without threatening their health. The big caveat with reducing the size of the sleeping area is being completely certain that their is still enough room for every single baby chick or chicken plus a little extra for bullying! If one chicken is left out she won’t survive being on her own. The good news is that it seems that even the rudest hen is happy to have the bottom of the pecking order next to her when it is bitterly cold, but that is something you want to be certain of. Also, give some thought to how many chickens you have. I have 6 and they produced enough body heat to make this work…I’m not sure how 2 or even 4 hens would have faired in a winter like this without some electricity.

#6 – Good ventilation is a must at all times for chickens (even in winter) because they tend towards respiratory problems. Ventilation also reduces frost-bite on combs because the moist air can escape instead of settle on their heads. However, heavy snow fall can block your ventilation ports and suffocate your hens in their sleep. We were so lucky that our ports didn’t get blocked overnight, and when I work on the coop this summer I plan to put ports in all three peaks. The three ports on the side are very attractive, but locating ventilation at peaks and over doors completely prevents them from being blocked by snow unless we get 3 feet in a single evening. If I had realized that earlier I could have completely covered the screens this winter and piled even more hay against the outer wall.

#7 – Radiator Waterer. Most chicken keepers that don’t use electricity will note that they change the water twice a day when it begins freezing. We took that a step further and fill our 1.3 gallon waterer with the hottest water my tap can produce and hang it in the coop as a sort of ‘radiator’. The hens seem to enjoy a hot drink of water and I’m quite sure they enjoy the extra heat boost. The waterer hangs in the most exposed area of the coop, so if the water is completely frozen when we change it out that is a good indication of how much heat the coop is keeping.

#8 – Keep it Dry! Keeping the coop as dry as possible helps prevent frost-bit combs, respiratory distress and helps maintain heat. The waterers have been a headache in this regard because they tend to leak if a child (or a mom) bumps them as they are hung. At every waterer change I break about two handfuls of frozen hay out of that corner and dump it into the chicken yard. Despite this, creating a transition area between the pop door and the nesting boxes and roosting areas is going to pay off in the frozen winter and in the rainy spring and fall. Think of it as a little mud room or foyer where they can wipe off their feet and shake off the rain. A designated space for this also helps keep that hay moving to the next best spot.

#9 – Deep Litter! Our litter isn’t very deep because the rooster and our other two hens spent the summer at the Green House. When I moved hay from the sleeping area to the eating area, I just moved the very top layer that had gotten wet and had begun to smell. A well designed coop (and my lovely little white coop is very flawed) will make use of deep litter to such an extent that the micro-organisms breaking down the deep litter generates noticeable heat. A really healthy nitrogen-rich deep-litter becomes a source of heat…natures own original radiant floor heating. I hope to get this set up properly at the greenhouse and then report back on how that is going.

#10 – High Fat and High Protein Treats. Now is the time to pull out every last suet cake you have in the freezer. Here is how to make one with stuff you usually throw away. Your hens need every last one. If you found a cracked egg, now is the time to fry it up and give it back to your hens. They need every little bit of fat and protein you can scrounge up for them. Hen’s actually have very high body temperatures, which is how they keep their babies warm, but that also means you need to help feed that furnace. How is the best way to give them those treats?

#11 – Boredom Busters. Putting all the chicken treats in a suet cake holder helps keep food off the ground and also gives them something interesting to pick at. Hens can really up their ‘mean girl’ game when they are under stress. A rooster helps with this in general, but Sunny can’t be in the subdivision, so the girls could get naughty if we don’t have interesting chicken things for them to do. Scratching is the chicken’s favorite thing to do, so we have offered lots of chicken scratch tossed directly into the hay so they will keep turning it and keeping it fluffed. Putting whole bits of vegetables into the suet cake holder also gives them something green and refreshing to get after, which they enjoy. I recommend this suet cake holder because it is huge and will hold all shapes and sizes of treats.

#12 – Turkey Friends! While getting a building permit for the new chicken coop, and got some great advice from a long-time chicken keeper. She found that having a turkey in with her laying hens made a world of difference in the heat in the chicken coop. Apparently a turkey generates far more body heat and her coop was almost hot all last winter. This year she ate all her turkeys before the weather got really cold and she had to get out her electric heaters. As a bonus, she found that when she had no rooster, but had a tom turkey in with her hens that she never had hawk problems! That is a fascinating option! I might need to get out my favorite chicken book again and read up on how to integrate turkeys with chickens.

Hope these ideas help you. My beginning winter preps done in December can be seen here. The winter started out mild and even an ice storm and snow that lasted many days was well tolerated by the girls. If your weather starts to get really bad, I hope you find this useful!

Brass Egg™ participates in affiliate marketing programs, and may receive compensation when you click and purchase from links to retailers. Brass Egg™ of Russell Holdings Group, LLC 2021. All content ©2021 Russell Illinois Holdings, LLC. All Rights Reserved.