It took us a few weeks, but we recently completed construction of our chicken coop and run for four chickens (hopefully hens) that Peter's teacher, Wendy Treat, gave us.
The chickens are named Peter (a Brown Well Summer breed), Midnight (a Black Sex Link), Meta Knight (a Lakenvelder breed) and Kirby (a Rhode Island White). Not the best names if we are trying to nudge the cosmos toward making sure they are all hens, but they certainly reveal the boys' passions at the moment of naming, earlier in the fall when the chickens were palm-sized morsels. Peter named Peter and Midnight. He had long wanted a black hen, according to Wendy, and the name Midnight is nicely evocative. In all the time they've named their mountains of stuffed animals, they've never named anything after themselves. So while I haven't asked Peter why he named the Brown Well Summer after himself, I'll just take it as a sign of how attached he is to these animals. Sammy named Kirby and Meta Knight after two characters from a video game that he is learning to play. While we know that at least Midnight is a hen, we're still waiting on the other three. I feel hopeful, but if one of them turns out to be a rooster, we'll have to find it another home.
We built the coop following a design in use at the Life Lab on the UCSC Farm program. It features a main room with an elevated perch and a nook in the rear with nesting boxes. The roof is hinged so we can raise one side and look in (in the picture, it is the side on the right) and there is also a hinged roof over the nesting boxes (the lower portion sticking out on the right as well). We also have a door on the side that we can open to clean out the inside of the coop (and harvest that reputedly fertilizer-iffic chicken poop).
I was slow in building the coop because I was feeling unsure of my very rusty carpentry skills, and because I wanted the boys to help out as much as possible. As I noted in the previous post, they used all the tools, except the circular saw, including the power drill and staple gun. I had them measuring and marking and talking about how and why we were doing everything we did. Their attention spans were often short, but managed to get it all together somehow.
Noriko and I decided to build the run around our existing planting boxes. This hadn't been a great year for our vegetable garden, mostly because of our extensive travel and Noriko's stretch run on her book manuscript. But I think the final determinant in our decision was the convenience and security. Behind our chicken coop is an area of dense over-growth at the property line with our backyard neighbors. The ancient fence there has fallen over (into our side) and has been covered over in a thicket of blackberry brambles and ivy. Underneath that fallen fence is now a tunnel that I call "Raccoon Highway." I've been trying to convince our neighbors to go in on a good neighbor fence with us so that we could deprive the raccoons of their refuge, but so far I've had no luck. So that meant that we had to build the coop with the expectation that a family of raccoons live right next to it and would surely attack. As I worked on the coop and run, my mental image of these marauding raccoons grew and grew until they appeared in my mind as evil super criminals with adept human-like hands and acute puzzle-solving brains.
As you can see in the previous post, the construction of the run was really worrying me. But the planter boxes were lined with chicken wire on the bottom (to defend against gophers), so by stapling the chicken wire for the run to the outside of the boxes, I had a fully enclosed wire box for the chickens without forcing them to walk on wire all the time. The loose soil of the boxes also allows us to easily harvest a season of chicken poop for other parts of the garden.
In the end, I scavenged posts from an elevated bed frame someone had given us (elevated so that we could place a desk underneath), which you can see as the blue corner posts on the run. That determined the height, just over four feet, which is just perfect for making the boys the appropriate people to clean it out.
Given the time it took to make the coop and the frequent fall rains that interrupted our work, the back part of the roof warped a bit. That annoys me a bit, but it is working out fine for the moment for it gives us enough room in the gap between roof and side wall to run a wire into the heat lamp we have inside (the coop glows a beautiful and expensive red all night long).
The first night the chickens spent outside, I was a nervous wreck. Almost immediately after the sun went down, the raccoons came out and began their inspection. Fearing that the boys would wake up to find shredded chickens strewn about the run, I kept going outside nearly all night long in a pointless attempt to convince the raccoons that I was watching them. In the morning, we found muddy footprints all over the coop, but the chickens were safe.
One week in and the chickens remain healthy and happy.
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