Because if it had four, it would be a chicken sedan! Ha! Sometimes I really crack myself up!
Coops and runs, runs and coops! We have both! We have a coop with two runs and a run with a coop. This post is all about our main coop and our Chicken Tractor (better known as our secondary coop). We built the coop and one run which we used when we first got the first brood of chickens in August 2014. We initially bought 11 chickens and needed a place for them to sleep and lay eggs and spend their days. Once our second brood was ready to be integrated with the main brood, we finished the Chicken Tractor.
First comes the main coop which is a typical chicken coop and has two chicken doors, initially had 6 nesting boxes and one roosting area. We initially put a solid door on the front that lifted up, but determined it would be easier to open and clean if it were two separate doors, so we cut it in half. Now, each side of that door can open independently or together depending on how much of the coop we need to get into. I think we are the only people at least in our area that put architectural shingles on a chicken coop, but boy does it look good! We put a vent and window on each side for ventilation and covered each with chicken wire (so the inside won’t stink as much due to all the chicken poop and so we don’t find that the chickens literally, flew the coop). We did not insulate the inside, but put plywood down on the floor and covered it with pine chips. I don’t think the initial brood ever had anything to roost on in their former home, so they never really took to the roosting bars, but the new batch did, so they are used well.
Our main coop is 8’x4′ and is a lot of space for all the birds (33 total were in there). The nesting boxes are built so the collection doors are on the top and the boxes and doors are outside of the coop so it takes up less space in the coop…it’s all about chicken comfort. If you were wondering, each box has 3 nests and each nest is good for 3 chickens, so with 6 nests, we had enough for 18 chickens for laying. We ended up adding a third nesting box with three nests when we increased the brood, which nobody seems to want to lay eggs in but seem to enjoy just lounging in. Now the next question on your mind must be, how do you know they lounge in those nests? Well, you can always tell where a chicken has been because there is poop. So, no eggs+poop (lots of it), means they simply enjoying hanging out and are probably sleeping in those lower nests. We do not feed or water in the coop and it has worked out well, even in subzero weather, as the chickens saw no issue being outside all day during our last snow event. We added solar panels to the roof of the run and have a battery and light on a timer inside the coop. Wait, what? A light? Solar panels? Yes, we went there. The light is for the time of year when there is less than 14 hours of sunlight (i.e.winter). When there is less than 14 hours of sunlight, the hens get very unhappy (as do I honestly) and stop laying or lay a lot less. So as to make sure we did not have unhappy chickens (it’s always about their happiness, right?), we had the light come on super duper early in the morning, say 4 a.m. so they were pleasantly awakened and given light so they didn’t stop laying. But wait, you say, it is still DARK OUTSIDE. Yes, I know, but that doesn’t seem to bother the old hens as they kept right on a layin’ all winter long! We clean out the inside of the coop about every quarter and we simply open the doors, rake the contents into the tractor bucket and haul it off to the compost pile to use in the garden later this year. Below are the pictures of the coop. Don’t forget to scroll past them to learn about the Chicken Tractor!
Ok, next to the Chicken Tractor! What is a Chicken Tractor? Well, for our purposes, it is a portable chicken coop/run. We will be putting our Dominique chickens (all 8 of them) in here later this Spring. We will do this because our Dominiques are excellent foragers and will get all those bugs and such out of the orchard and will also fertilizing the orchard as they go. We will move it every week or so to different areas of the orchard to spread all that goodness around! We initially built just the run part of the Chicken Tractor to house our second clutch. Just FYI, a clutch is a group of chicks whereas a brood is a group of chickens!
When we ordered our clutch of chicks they were shipped at a day old and got to us at 3 days old. So we put all 20 in the run part of the Tractor to grow over winter. We received them in September and thought they would be in there until April. They sure are fast growers! All grows up a lot sooner than we anticipated! We ended up integrating them in December. Thankfully, we had a pretty mild winter so not too cold to get them into the coop and runs Once we integrated them into the existing brood, we built the coop on top of the run and enclosed it with a roof, so it became a self-enclosed coop and run.
So there you have it! Pretty schmantzie coops for those chickens! Again, it is all about happy chickens!