The Nohea Moa Chicken Yard
Their coop is on the right. The structure on the left is a rain shelter. The whole pen is surrounded by chicken wire to discourage any dogs and cats.
My main regret about this set up so far is that its so shaded that the chickens took out all the grass right away. Luckily we have plenty of wood chips available. My current solution is to close off the sunnier front half of the pen (not pictured) and seed it with grains I had on hand. Now I'm just waiting for the plants to get a little bigger before reopening the front half and letting my flock enjoy the green forage. In the meantime, my birds can't wait for me to come around in the morning with kale or broccoli. We also throw in plenty of grass from other places. I'm planning a second coop and pen in a sunnier grassier location for my second flock (hopefully to be hatched in September!).
This is our chicken coop. As you can see, we only put plywood on one wall for a windbreak. We hung chicken wire for the other 3 walls in order to maximize ventilation. Since our oldest pullets were hatched on the 9th of April, we decided to wait to add the nest-boxes until August. When we install those on the back wall that will provide some additional windbreak. The chicken yard is surrounded by a berm also which reduces the wind factor.
It sure does rain a lot here! We gave the roof 3 ft of overhang to keep our chickies dry.
I'm sorry for this blurry picture. I'll try to get some better pictures up later.
If you cross your eyes a little and use your imagination, in the center of the photo you can see one of my black australorps at the top of a wood plank about to hop into the coop through a hole in the chicken wire. Since there are no nocturnal predators to speak of here on Maui, we don't even have to shut their door at night -or open it in the morning!!!
We decided to go with the deep litter method + diatomaceous earth, and so far it seems to be working out fine.
