Thursday, May 22, 2014

Chicken Farmers

Chicken Farmers

Nathan decided he wanted chickens. So here are a few photos from our adventures in chicken farming.


 This is the brooding box Nathan made for them. At this point they are obviously not little anymore, but we got them just days after hatching.

Before the coop was ready we would bring the chickens out
into the front yard and let the kids play with them. 


The coop. Up on top is Nathan's weather station.


 This is the chicken run. You can see the automatic chicken door at the bottom of the coop.
It opens each morning and closes each evening to let the chickens into the run or back in the coop. Nathan is building an automatic feeding and water system also. That's what's on the far right in the picture.

The chickens love the roosting bars!

We use sand in the coop. We bought 4 kitty litter shovels and every morning we send the kids out to shovel the chicken poop.

This is Splash. Her foot started showing signs of curling at 4 weeks old. Eventually her whole leg was paralyzed. We didn't catch it at 4 weeks, unfortunately. We looked back at pictures we'd taken each week to find when the problem started. We took her out of the brooder box with the other chickens and gave her a box to herself because she couldn't get to the water and food. It was sad. When we tried to integrate her back with the other chickens, they wouldn't accept her. The kids took losing her pretty hard.

Here they are enjoying the roost

Gorgeous birds 

 A bird built a nest behind the automatic feeder and now there are two little eggs in the nest!


 These are the nesting boxes and off on the far right you get a glimpse of the roosting bars.  These pictures were before we put the chickens in, so there's all kinds of junk still hanging out in the coop.


We just bought paint, classic red and white to make it look like a real barn. We haven't painted yet, but when we get around to it, I'll post pictures.

No comments: