Chicken coop...

Today we are going to take a quick tour of our chicken coop. As you read this you will quickly realize that we are lazy chicken keepers. But they are happy and healthy and give us plenty of eggs, so it all works out!

We have a solar powered chicken door (in yellow) that opens at whatever time we program it to open and close. It's awesome and a necessary thing to have on auto pilot because chickens get up before the crack of dawn and want out of the coop. They will tell you, believe me! the brown coop attached to the green one is where we put our new pullets. They hang out in there for a while to get used to the area, hear the older hens and grow bigger. If we let them out while still small they would get pecked by the bigger ones.

Here is the waterer, it is great because it gives the chickens fresh clean water that they need and we don't have to re-fill it for several days, sometimes a whole week! The bendy tube goes down to the PVC pipe which has some nipples attached that the chickens use to get their water. They are so handy to have! We love the waterer.

This is the feeder that my handy husband made. I found a picture of something like this a few years back and I was getting tired of going out every day to refill food and water that he built it pretty quickly. It holds almost 25lbs of chicken feed so we don't have to go out and re-fill every day any longer. We have 9 hens right now and we might fill it twice in a month. Sweet!

Below you can see the feeder in action. The chickens just jump up on the front lever and the lid opens up for them to eat. This keeps the critters out...mostly. The chickens make a huge mess with their pecking and swishing the food around that pellets are usually all over the ground too. They eat them but we may need to add a little edge to the feeder sometime...maybe.

Here is one of the side doors to the coop, this is where they lay eggs and perch at night. The blue boxes are the nesting boxes that they lay in. The two wooden perches are their perches for nighttime.

The above picture is taken outside the far door of the picture below. You can see the inside of the coop. Below the perches are frames filled with sand as litter, this is the best for picking up and cleaning the coop. I just use a cat litter scoop and scoop the poop since they poop all night (we use that poop in the compost!). Super easy.

The nesting boxes are on the floor of the coop. We used to have 8 boxes (we also used to have 21 chickens...) but I found that the chickens would knock the top boxes down and fight over them so I limited the number of boxes and left the 4 on the ground level available for them. The four boxes low to the ground filled with straw works very well. And we collect the eggs through the back of the coop without disturbing any one.

Here is the back of the coop where we collect eggs.

Top boxes are "closed for business" and the bottom ones are the ones they use.

EGGS. We get lots and lots of eggs. These are hard boiled. Yum.

Thanks for stopping in!