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11/12/2007: "City Chicks"

As promised, this posting is about the chicken set-up that I've been working on here in Portland for the last six months. Although technically speaking the chickens are not at Living Green Farm, they are still a farm-like enterprise; I can still recall Nate's first words over the phone when I told him that we had taken the plunge and gotten some baby chicks. He said, "Congratulations! You've got livestock!"

We got our chicks at Pistils Nursery, off Mississippi Avenue in Portland. It was the Sunday after Easter, and we peered into the stocktank under the heat lamp, and tried to pick out lively and healthy chicks from the bustling mass of cheeping baby chicks. We initially bought four chicks, heeding the warning posted above the stock tank that the sex of chicks could not be guaranteed; I thought we should end up with either three or four for the space I had in mind, and if one turned out to be a rooster he would have to go live down at the farm. It was a warm day, and the chicks cheeped incessantly in the box that carried them all the way home in the car.

I knocked together a little 2 x 3 foot brooder, suspended a heat lamp over it, and we put the chicks in with some water and chick food. They were prolific cheep-ers, prolific poopers, and awesomely cute in a clumsy sort of way. The first few days they were like wind-up toys: one minute they'd be walking around, and the next minute one would pitch forward on its beak and power-nap. I gradually augmented their feed with chopped dandelion leaves, which they would eat avidly. The daughters and I made nightly trips down to the basement to change their water and newspaper under the brooder. One night I came down to the basement to find one chick stretched out dead; she was given a ceremonial burial under a hand-lettered sign that said, "Lilly - best chick ever."



Gradually the puff balls became gawky "teenage" chicks. Given their taste for live food, one afternoon we took them out in the backyard in a box with a removable flap on the bottom. I set them over an ant colony, and they went to town slurping down ants.



We also tried to gently handle the chicks as much as possible, to get them used to human contact. In the photo above you can see two of the three chicks on my arm, waiting for dandelion treats. The brooder is visible in the lower right of the photo. As they grew they developed distinct personalities: the small golden chick higher on my arm was thought to be an Amercauna when we got her, but it later turned out she was a Sicilian Buttercup; she's the most nervous and cautious chick. The Barred Rock chick behind her is quite tame and calm. Not visible in this picture is the Silver-Laced Wyandotte, the smartest chick in the bunch: if you drop a bug in the brooder, she's the one that always gets it.

As time passed, the chicks grew bigger... and bolder. It got so that I had to keep wire netting over the brooder to keep the smart chick from flying around the basement. The basement started to acquire a certain, ah, odor. In June I decided that I had better get busy on a permanent outside home. Some friends in the neighborhood advised us about chickens: "You won't believe the boldness of the rats attracted by the chicken feed!" Other inner-city Portland neighbors told us stories of friends who went on vacation and came home to find that raccoons had had a chicken dinner party. Thinking of this, I broke ground on a fairly ambitious project to house the chicks next to the garage.



The way to defeat the rats, I decided was to put the coop on a concrete pad. Since the area was so large, and I was mixing the concrete by hand, I had to build forms and pour in sections.



I mixed the concrete two bags at a time in my little wheelbarrow. It was the first time in a number of years that I had done concrete work, so I was a little rusty on technique, but I got the job done. My biggest mistake was not waiting long enough for the concrete to set before starting to smooth the top; I learned this from a concrete artisan I met on the train home from work.



The daughters helped by putting on their waterproof boots and stomping the concrete. Even with their help, the little 2 x 7 foot sections were barely do-able before the concrete began to set. Each form took an afternoon to set up, and another afternoon to pour.



One of the chicken books that I have said that one should be prepared to spend four hundred dollars on a coop. Initially, I thought that was ridiculously extravagant; how much could plywood and some 2x2's and some chicken wire cost? Then I talked to another acquaintance at the elementary school, who told me that poultry netting was insufficient to keep out raccoons; even if they can't tear it, which they sometimes are able to do, they'll reach through it, grab a chicken and pull part of the chicken through the netting. Oh, and our next-door neighbors confided to us that they thought that the raccoons that I'd seen in the neighborhood actually lived under their deck. So, now I had to think of a more secure system; who wants to explain to a daughter that daddy's chicken coop wasn't raccoon-proof? I decided to use hardware cloth (mesh) sandwiched between cedar battens; the cedar would last longer, the hardware cloth would be raccoon-proof, and the battens would hold the mesh better than staples. I spent my $400 budget on the first trip to the big box lumber store, and I knew I was no where near done.



The hardest part about building the main cage, or play area as it came to be known, was unrolling the hardware cloth. It comes wound into a 4" diameter bundle, and it took some doing to unroll it and pre-stress it into a more or less flat shape. After two weekends of "zip-zip" noises coming from the screw gun, I had a cage up. Our daughters celebrated by eating dinner in the new enclosure.



The cage has number of doors to choose from. The one we use most often is the little window-sized door just above the bottom planks on the long side: the planks keep the chickens in, and we can drop tomatoes or wheat berries in for them as treats. Above that door is another door, so that I can turn sideways and go in to check on something. Finally, the entire far end of the cage is a door large enough to bring a wheelbarrow in to remove or add bedding material.

The chicks, or more correctly pullets, seemed much happier in their new home. No more excitement in the basement, trying to keep them from going on poop-scattering strolls around the pinball machines and furnace. I put a bed of chipped branches in the enclosure, along with their food and water. Nights were still cold, so I put a lid on the brooder, added windows and a door, and locked them in before bed each night.



After about four and half months we began to experience the blessed event: eggs!



It took us a while to figure out whose eggs were whose, but eventually we concluded that smart chick, AKA "Miracle", was the first layer, laying smooth brown eggs. Mabel, the big chick, was next in production laying speckled brown eggs, and eventually Maple (sometimes called Ginger) started laying white eggs. Initially I didn't even have a nesting box in there (the brooder only lasted a few more weeks until they outgrew it), so they were squeezing themselves under the feeder and laying eggs there. Once I put the nesting box in they still insisted on squeezing into the four inch wide space between a cardboard box that I put under the feeder and the nesting box to lay their eggs. I eventually put a large stack of bricks under the feeder, and then they finally consented to lay clean eggs in the nesting box.

However, it was time to start thinking about colder weather, which was just around the corner in early Fall. I thought about it, and decided that I wanted to combine the functions of compost bin and hen house. I reasoned that if chickens like to roost in trees, perhaps they would like an elevated henhouse - it might seem like roosting up in a tree. Walking through the big box store one day, I spotted a 3 x 5 foot panel of vinyl covered particle board - Eureka! I'll use that as the floor of the hen house, and build a scraper into the hen house: you pull the floor out, the scraper scrapes the bedding and poop off, and it all falls into the compost bin. I was pretty proud of the idea of the Self-Cleaning Hen House, so I started screwing together 2 x 2's and plywood.



I settled on a fairly simple shed roof design, with a large, refrigerator style door opening at one end where the tray would slide out. The other end would have an opening into the caged enclosure, with a sliding shutter to keep them in or out of the hen house.



Some detail showing the slot where the floor slides out, and the 2 x 4 poop scraper a little further in.



I bought a bale of compressed cellulose insulation, and shredded it and put it in the walls to insulate the critters from hot days - wasn't too worried about cold hardiness, though it might help there, too.



The compost bin base was built out of stout cedar 2 x 4's, with more hardware cloth stapled over it.



The door was tricky - I wanted a window to look in, so as to be sure that no one was about to fly out when I want to open it. I also added a little priest hole door: the nest box sits on the shelf and has an opening in its rear panel, so I can open the little flap door and get the eggs without opening the big door. The door is also extra thick with insulation in the middle, since it is on the west wall where the sun will strike it in the late summer evenings. The photo above shows the tray partially pulled out; I later added a hand hole for easy gripping.

The roof is more complex than you can see here; it started out as a flat board of half-inch plywood. Then I decided that I wanted it insulated, so I made a box that hung down as an insulated false ceiling. Then I worried that this might cause an attic fire, with the heat of a shingled roof concentrated in the false ceiling, so I created an air space between the first roof and a second layer of plywood that I put above it. Heat that conducts through the top roof should cause cooling convection to occur in the open channels between roof panels... the perfect solution, if of course one ignores cost and the time to build all this...



The photo above was taken a few days ago, and shows the nearly completed complex; since then I've shingled the hen house with standard tab roofing. The tarp has been replaced by a plywood roof that should do a better job of keeping their bedding dry; I replaced the bedding recently (you can see the old bedding spread over the garden beds), and I've seen them happily taking dust baths in the new dry litter. Egg production continues to be surprisingly high: there are two or three eggs waiting for us nearly every day, even as the days shorten. At some point they'll go into molt, however, and we'll drop off. For now, we're enjoying twelve-egg omelets every Saturday, and giving away a half dozen eggs at a time here and there to the neighbors... you want the neighbors to be ready to perform egg duty when we're out of town!

Finally, here is a photo of 'the girls,' waiting expectantly at the treats window.