Automatic chicken coop door

Posted by louisa on Monday 4 October 2010 in chickens | 1 comment

Most of our chicken-related to-do list had to be put on hold yesterday because we don’t have gills any more. It was raining a little. (The beck at the bottom of the garden was flowing insanely fast – felt like a proper river rather than a little stream. It wasn’t a good day to have disturbed myself reading a book about a weather-caused apocalypse.)

Anyway, one chicken thing we did get to do this weekend was fit the automatic door for the pop hole. We decided to go for it – to “justify” the cost, I’ve instigated Alice’s suggestion of (retroactively) saving up for it by giving up fleeting wants and as for the chore element, John pointed out that it’s silly not to automate something that can easily be automated just because I feel guilty or lazy. Cleaning out the coop can’t be automated, dusting them for mites can’t be either, but the pop hole can be.

The gadget arrived on Saturday morning and John was delighted that he could tell exactly how it worked by looking at the simple circuit – gives me hope for us fixing it if things went wrong. The mechanism can lift & lower a door weighing up to 3kg, or up to 6kg if used with pulleys – meaning our little wooden door would be no problem and we didn’t have to make/buy/fit a new door (hurrah!).

Adding a second level to the chicken run?

Posted by louisa on Thursday 23 September 2010 in chickens | 0 comments

In advance of possibly expanding the tribe, I’ve been thinking of installing a mezzanine level in part of the chicken run. A metre-square or so, depending on the dimensions of the building materials.

I’ve had two ideas for it:

1) A table-like design – but with a rim around the outside so that it could hold wood chippings like on the floor of their run, and essentially be just a raised extension of the ground, or

2) Something slatted/including perches, since they do rather like perching.

The first option (which I’d likely make with a solid-topped pallet I was given recently, or with old formica desks that John’s dad salvaged from the skip at the school near him) would provide extra shelter in the run but might have drainage problems. The latter (made with other wooden pallets) wouldn’t provide any shelter but wouldn’t clog up with mud either, and as I said, they do rather like perching.

Any suggestions/thoughts?

Should we get more chickens?

Posted by louisa on Sunday 19 September 2010 in chickens | 2 comments

And on a related should-we-shouldn’t-we matter, we’re currently trying to decide whether or not to get more chickens.

We’d always planned to get some Point of Lays in the autumn – the healthy spring chicks all growed up. According to my chicken guy, they are the best chickens to get – healthier in general and don’t go into moult as quickly as those born at other times of the year so stay productive for longer.

The original plan had been to get our chickens last autumn, job done, but when the coop & run were delayed, we got our four girls in the early summer – winter chicks come of age. Now it’s autumn again and we’re thinking whether or not to expand our collective.

For expansion: More eggs, especially over winter when they’ll all slow down.
Against expansion: We don’t use the four a day we’re getting at the moment. It’s nice to give the spares away though. Over winter, it’ll be nice to have a good supply but in more clement weather, we might get overwhelmed!

£100 for lie-ins: to get an automatic chicken door or not?

Posted by louisa on Friday 17 September 2010 in chickens, frugal | 2 comments

Since we got the chickens in June, I’ve been thinking, on and off, about getting an automatic door for their pop hole. Light-sensitive, it’ll open first thing in the morning and close again after they’ve put themselves to bed when it gets dark. It’ll allow the chickens to live to natural rhythms rather than our rhythms, and in the winter, it’ll mean they get the maximum daylight possible.

But we don’t really need one.

Left to our own devices, we stay up late and sleep late. I list “sleep” as an active hobby: I like the feeling of lying down, of being snuggly warm, and my vivid often lucid dreams are engrossing, often interactive, movies personalised for an audience of one. And nothing beats a lazy morning in bed, surrounded by animals, and reading a good book. Sadly that sort of lifestyle isn’t conducive with having a dog, let alone chickens and while I’m quite adept at running down to the coop in my robe, then jumping back into bed for a couple more hours of snoozing, it just isn’t the same. To be fair, we do get up in good time during the week but to not have to get up that early on weekends or days off, that would be great. An automatic door opener would allow us to wake up in our own time then go down to check on the chickens after breakfast.

But we don’t need to have lie-ins, we just like them.

Supersized egg!

Posted by louisa on Monday 9 August 2010 in chickens | 0 comments

After a run of just three eggs a day nearly all last week, then three eggs and a small pale one yesterday, we’re back to four eggs again now – and boy, one of the girls is over-achieving!

The smaller egg here weighs around 60g – which is the large end of medium and a typical size for our girls – but the big one weighs over 90g! No wonder I was woken up by some loud bwarking this morning! According to standard UK egg sizing guidelines, anything over 73g is a XL-sized egg – this is quite a bit over 73g!

I suspect Mrs Mauve is responsible for it – she’s quite a bit bigger than the other girls but she’s still only a young one, 26 weeks old max, so she – and her eggs – might get bigger still. Yesterday I was working in the garden and they got a lot of greens/veg – I’ll have to keep a check on the treats/super-large egg thing is causal or a coincidence.

Chicken update: one month in

Posted by louisa on Tuesday 3 August 2010 in chickens | 5 comments

Apologies for the radio silence for the last few days – a combination of illness, internet downtime and a visit from my mum & dad. Because of the first and the third things, I’ve not been up to much – just pottering and keeping the garden/animals watered. I did though start a crochet blanket (using Attic24’s granny stripe pattern) with the wool I dyed at the start of June – it’s working up really fast and looking great!

Anyway, I intended to do a quick chicken update last week so I suppose I should get it ;)

The chickens have been with us for over a month now and are very well settled in. We still haven’t named them but we have ringed their legs so we can tell them apart and the colours have become defacto names. The Greens – Lime & Dark – are the more confident of the four, Blue is quite friendly but always squats when we go near her (said to be a submissive or scaredy thing) and Ms Mauve is the biggest but shyest one.