Ooops, forgot to indicate this is in response to fletcherfarm:
Quote:
Originally Posted by fletcherfam 
So the wife and I bought 4 chickens this weekend. The lady we purchased them from is keeping them until we get the coop built (3 weeks). Question for everyone on here, do you recommend a stationary coop & run, or a tractor? We have a backyard that is 60' x 60' that we could pull the tractor on, what are your thoughts?
I started with a tractor and then moved to a stationary coop but let the girls out to free range all day. I started with 4 hens and a wooden tractor. The doors stick when it rains, and it was cumbersome to move by myself, especially when the ground was soggy.
Then I bought an Eglu Cube with the extended run - love the coop, super easy to clean and move around. It is also bigger, so I bought a few more hens. I could not justify having paid an enormous sum of money to have a contractor build me a coop that I used for only a month, so it had a few chickens in it as well. I have 3 acres, but very little of it is flat The Eglu needs flat, or close to it. The coop was great in the spring and summer, but then late fall arrived, and the eaten grasses never grew back, and soon I was moving the coop from one patch of mud to the next; and then the snows came. The snows got too deep to open the door that accesses the food and water. The run door and egg door are high up, so they still worked fine. We built a walk-in coop, and I bought a second Eglu Cube to put in our dog kennel. The dog-kennel bantam coop houses my cochins (3 bantam + 2 large fowl). Now my original eglu cube is the bachelor coop for Bantam roosters. When the weather is nice, they get moved around the yard, but for the winter they are parked in a dense stand of trees. I keep enough food in it so they can go fine for a week or two without me adding more. These boys don't free-range. They suffer from Napoleon Complexes and try and take on my big Orpington Rooster
Now I have, gulp, 38 chickens. Too many(7) are males, and I have not figured out how to coax an egg out of them yet. You'd think wall-papering their coop walls with chicken recipes and photos of processed chickens would be enough of a threat. They have figured out I'm a softie, well at least when it comes to the bantam boys. DD's eyes get really big and well up with tears... (we name all the large fowl cockerals Stewie and trade them for processed young roosters. They are tasty, and the kids like eating them too much, but DD treats the Bantams more like hamsters, and I don't think one would ever eat a hamster...)
Edited by Ogress - 2/27/12 at 9:25pm
& Chantecler Fanciers International~~ 
