Thursday, April 14, 2011

Chickens!

The next adventure for Ben and I is Chickens! Ben's always wanted to have chickens but hadn't acted on it. I saw a friend that had chickens and thought about the prospect of fresh eggs and trying my hand at something new and decided it could be fun. I think Ben was a little surprised when I said lets get chickens but he jumped right in. We decided to put the chicken coup outside our fence using the shed and fence as two walls, less walls to build right? I would have been fine with something small and easy but Ben dreamed up this beauty. No coyotes will be getting to our chickens very easily that's for sure. The wonderful before shot.


I know our weeds got a little out of control this year.

Laying out the walls using lattice we already had. Ben was pretty ingenious and designed the whole thing around the lattice we already had.

Supplies


We put the poles in on Saturday and decided to get at least one wall up Sunday afternoon. Since it was such a beautiful day we did carne asada tacos outside and had ourselves a little tailgate party.


Ever notice how well behaved your dogs are when there's food around?
One wall up. Ben putting up the roof supports.
A finished coup! The chickens! We got 5 total, 3 Leghorns, 1 New Hampshire Red and 1 Jersey Black. Their names are Big Red, Lafawnda, Moose, Duck, and Turkey, if you were wondering. They are living in the cage inside the coup right now because one is still small enough to potentially slip through the lattice. At they rate they are growing they will soon be allowed out of the cage.

We shall see how this adventure goes. So far it has been fun and interesting. The dogs are tortured by the fact that they aren't allowed inside the coup to chase chickens. We won't have eggs for a while either but so far so good!

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