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I've found that the only reliable way to prevent rodents from getting at the food at night is to put the feeder into a metal garbage can and close the lid on it. Mice, and rats in particular, can chew right through plastic, even PVC pipe. If you cover the ports, they'll chew through they may...

For safety reasons, I strongly recommend that you buy a commercial product and not build one on your own. Our company doesn't manufacture a heater at this time, but we've done enough research on the subject to know that cords, plugs, plastics etc are more complicated than one might imagine. Not...

There's no real research on the matter of whether pumpkin eliminates worms. However, you can feed pumpkin -- flesh, seeds, guts to chickens. If you're carving a halloween pumpkin, you have a perfect opportunity to give your girls the seeds. By the way, if you would like a template for a...

Will do. Also, I write a newsletter for my customers and think they would appreciate the information you've so meticulously pulled together. Please let me know if it would be OK to link to your spreadsheet, or if you would be interested in writing a post for the newsletter. If you just want to...

I tried an all metal treadle feeder but ended up not using it in the end. They do work, but there are some compromises.... It takes the chickens a while to get used to it and some chickens are always skittish about using it because when they get off the peddle it makes clanging sound. Rats...

Texs KiKi, thanks very much. It must have been a lot of work to put this together. Great resource.

I use a variant of this.... "Common sense isn't common practice."

Folly and Alaskan make a good point. The reason you want ventilation of your coop is because your chicken's poop when they roost and the poop gives off lots of ammonia gas. This gas needs to be flushed from the coop so your chicken's don't experience difficulty breathing. You don't want cold...

LOL. There's some truth in what you say. My first coop was not fancy or pretty, but it was designed well and it took quite a bit of effort to build. It was my mid-life-crisis project.

I'm building on the good advice Ridgerunner supplied with regard to the bloom on eggs. If you have an egg that has got some poop on it, you should wash it in hot water. This removes most of the contamination but it will also remove the bloom that protects the egg. After washing the egg, be...

I'm in agreement with aart on this. While some leftovers are fine, it's a general rule of thumb to keep table scraps and treats to under 10% of the food you feed your flock. Their feed is specially formulated to provide balanced nutrition.

I built my first coop directly under a hemlock tree. The tree dropped lots of needles that would gather on the metal roof of the coop and eventually stained it. If you can place your coop in the shadow cast by a tree without being close enough to the tree to have it drop leaves onto the coop...

Another option is the Netgear Arlo system. I installed them for home security but you can add quite a few cameras to the system and put one of these in a coop. They are triggered by motion so they might be useful for those with a predator problem. (If the camera is triggered it will also send...

An article in the LA times about how some owners go over the top to pamper their chickens in designer coops. https://www.latimes.com/lifestyle/story/2019-09-25/high-end-designer-chicken-coops-in-los-angeles

As others have mentioned, scratch is not a balanced food source and is not a substitute for their normal pellets or crumbles. Think of scratch as "candy" for chickens. The rule of thumb on treats is that they should comprise no more than 10% of your chickens diet ( I include scratch and table...

HenOnAJuneBug, thank you for being fact based! I did a quick calculation to compare the disease rates.... Assuming your figures are correct (768 sick from backyard chickens and 1.2 million sick in the US from all sources), I calculate that the illness rate is about 4000 times higher in homes...

Looks great. As Aart says, the color is a personal decision and there isn't a "right" answer. Whatever color you choose, remember you need to paint the wood with a primer first and then two or more coats of paint. Paint comes in "interior" and "exterior" formulations -- you want exterior paint...

Thanks for sharing this. Many of us have chickens in suburban areas and don't have enough property to allow foraging -- at least not total foraging. It's interesting to learn about those that have because feed is pretty expensive nowadays. Thanks for the post.

Chickens have trouble digesting milk products and can get diarrhea from them. Some people give their chickens a touch of yogurt because it contains some probiotic bacteria, but if you do want to do this, it would be best to go very sparingly or consider buying a probiotic supplement.

The regulations about keeping chickens are usually done by the town you live in, not at the state level. Check with your city council about what they will permit in your town. If a town allows chickens, they usually limit the number you can own to something like 6 chickens and also don't want...