Sunday morning chores

Posted by louisa on Sunday 11 September 2011 in chickens | 5 comments

(Blogging the little things to help inspire meh-me to doing both the little and big things!)

I’ve felt the same start of autumn/winter’s a-coming feeling that many of my favourite bloggers have touched on recently.

After the great red mite infestation of 2011, our chickens spent most of the summer sleeping outside – they clearly slept in the coop occasionally when it was raining or whatever but they got a taste for outdoor (presumably cooler) snoozing and since they were safe in the run, I got over my initial panic about it. I’ve been keeping an eye on the coop (for red mites and to make sure nothing else was afoot) but not had to clean it out as much. Now it’s getting darker/chillier/wetter though, they’ve moved back inside which means a return to Sunday morning poop-scooping for me. (With a good layer of wood shavings on the floor, it only needs cleaning out once a week at the moment but will need a mid-week freshener in the winter, when the nights are longer and they’re in the coop more than out.)

The chickens do like seeing what I’m doing to their house:

Except for Blue and the ever cheeky Lime who knew they could escape through the open nest box door to play out in the garden. Blue has been on a bit of a mission of late – whenever I leave open the chicken chest, she jumps onto the rim to look around. I think she knows the motherlode – the open 20kg bag of treat seed – is in there but can’t work out how to get down into it.

(Btw, the chicken chest – an old metal chest, about 3ft high by 3ft wide and about 1.5ft deep, has been one of my best purchases for the garden. It was £10 secondhand on eBay, picked up from just the other side of Bradford and it holds our bale of wood shavings, our nest box straw, the treat seed and sometimes a spare bag of layers pellets – all water-tight and pest-free. It looks rusty – one day I’ll paint it – but is very solid. The metal also gets pleasantly warm (but not hot) in the sun so the cats like sunbathing on the top of it. Win for everyone.)

Last winter, after my poop-scooping, my next job was always to fill up the kindling baskets in the living room & office so I did that today as well – we’ve used the stoves in both rooms over the last few weeks and used up the last dregs of last year’s supplies.

I also started to replenish the dustbin of kindling-size bits in the woodstore (it’s now a third full) so we’ve got some surplus if needed – if it’s too cold to work out there or if future Louisa can’t be bothered. I would have cut some logs as well if there hadn’t been an old sauna bench on the sawhorse (a lame excuse I know but an original one, yes?).

As chore-like as poop-scooping and kindling cutting are, I do quite enjoy them – fresh air, fun chickens and axes, what’s not to like? ;)

Chicken coop to-dos

Posted by louisa on Thursday 13 January 2011 in chickens | 2 comments

(I tried really, really hard to get a “cock-a-doodle-to-do” pun going on in the title but failed.)

I had a day away from my computer yesterday to catch up on outside & animal chores – and one of the things on my list was to give the chicken coop a mega-super clean.

I spotted what I thought was white mould all over the coop yesterday and knowing that’s, you know, not good, I stripped everything out this morning — everything that could be reasonably easily removed/taken apart got taken out so I could scrub *everywhere* down, from every angle.

The coop is about 4ft by 4ft square, with a sloped roof going up to about 4ft high in the middle, and it’s on stilts raising it about 18ins off the ground. I had to climb inside to be able to scrub the roof with (watered-down) disinfectant – perching like a giant chicken until my thighs were jelly! – and it was only when I did so that I realised the vast majority of the suspected white mould spores were actually just damp red mite powder from my last coop dousing. Still, since I was in there, and at least three chickens were in there at all times (keeping an eye on me in their house), I thought I might as well continue with the scrub down.

(Speaking of red mites, they’re back again – we had a few weeks with no sign of them (I presume they don’t like the really cold weather?) but now a small colony has return. I scrubbed it away yesterday but will dust the coop and the chickens this afternoon – I ran out of time yesterday – so I guess that’s To Do #1: dust chickens & coop for red mites.)

The bits of mould that were actually mould were inside the roof – and the roof itself looked damp. I scrapped all the accumulated wet leaves off the top of it in case that was adding the problem but suspect it’s just a bit leaky too – leaks between the wooden slats – so that’s To Do #2: explore a better roofing option.

The wood used for building the coop was treated before it was put together but after a wet nearly-year, I think it’ll need treating again so that’s To Do #3: reseal/treat all the wood. I’ll have to wait for a couple of warm, dry days for that – and will probably have to work out a way to keep it off-limits to the chickens for as long as possible.

Another thing I need to consider is improving the ventilation – poor ventilation is a key cause of mould. Funnily enough, I had thought that the ventilation “window” might have been too big for these cold winter nights – seems like the opposite was the case. Not sure how I’ll improve that without making it draughty or causing more damp spots so that’s To Do #4: figure out how to improve the ventilation without making more problems for myself.

Finally, an idea I had earlier in the winter but haven’t yet implemented has to go on my list: To Do #5: install a suspended floor that is easy to clean and insulated underneath. The current floor is made up of slats so there are little grooves inbetween each piece which accumulated grime – a floor made up from a single piece of wood (or two pieces to make it easier to move) and possibly covered with a scrap of lino would be a lot easier to keep clean. It could easily be “suspended” as there is a wooden baton, about 3cm high, all around the rim of the coop (where the sides are screwed onto) so could rest on that, with some cross bars so it doesn’t sag in the middle. The loss of height wouldn’t be a big deal at all.

Outside of the coop, in the run, there are a couple more things that will need attention this year:

• Reattach their play perches – some of them are a bit wobbly now
• Rat-proof it – the run was built to prevent foxes getting in but we didn’t consider rats. There are a few places where some wire and concrete will easily solve the problem.
• More wood chips – we put about half a tonne of wood chips in the run when we first set it up, then another tonne a month or so later – and I think we need another top up now. (Given the run is four flights of stairs down from the road, it’s a workout!). We use a deep litter principle in the run – the wood chips absorb the poop and rot down to compost. At some point, we’ll dig it out but for the moment, while the reclaimed ground underneath is still settling, we can just keep piling it on.

I guess having that not-strictly-needed cleaning time to think about these things will ultimately be for the best but now I have another eight jobs on my to-do list, I’m not feeling the joy right now!

If you’ve got chickens, anything special on your chores list for the coming months?