- May 15, 2015
- 14
- 14
- 79
I am in north-central Iowa on an acreage but am not a farmer though all of our surrounding neighbors are. Several of our neighbors and my co-workers keep small flocks of chickens. Thankfully none of us were hit by the bird flu.
This year my kids got the bee in their bonnet that they wanted chickens. I spent several months talking to friends and poking around this site and others - but not enough! We have a very large dirt-floor shed on our property that is not being used for anything else. It is roughly the size of two double-car garages placed side by side, long and narrow. We cleaned it up of the usual debris one might expect of an old farm acreage and now have 12 chickens 'living' there. We've had them since May 19th. We bought them as chicks from Thieson's.
We built a roosting area with elevated roosts that the chickens love and have about 6 inches deep of wood-chip mulch covering roughly 1/4 of the shed floor, including beneath the roosting area. The rest of the shed is just open and dirt floor. I am trying the 'deep litter' method, raking up the poopy bits every few days. We have a city yard waste site where city/tree service workers dump the chipped wood from storm damage and anyone can have the wood chips for free. I've used this as yard mulch and dog-kennel bedding for years. You have to rake through it a bit to get the 'good' chips and not any trash that might have been tossed in, but it's decent quality stuff over all. The downside is you have no way of knowing what varieties of trees the wood comes from and I've read that some can be bad for chickens, cedar I think?
We have put in a 'doggie door' and a rather small-ish outdoor run right now - it is irregularly shaped as we just used supplies we had around the place to enclose it sides and top. I read a lot about how to 'coop train' them and we have never had a problem getting them into the shed - though they were very reluctant to LEAVE it when we first built the run/doggie door. When our dog is outside/unsupervised, the chickens can be in the run. When we get home from work and bring her in, we let the chickens out to the whole yard (2.5 acres) to 'free range' and then let the dog out again for a bedtime potty break after the chickens are inside the shed again. Our dog does a GREAT job of keeping away varmints but she would absolutely eat the chickens! We've closed up every largish hole in the shed.
We have not yet built nesting boxes/space. The chickens are very young - they still 'cheep' instead of 'cluck' and don't have full combs yet and such, though they are now bigger than the barn cats or at least as big as, and have full feathers. We're estimating laying to start not before October based on what Thieson's told us.
My questions, along with some explanation:
1. I keep reading the importance of ventilation, especially in the winter and I am confused. We have very cold/windy winters and I usually go out of my way to 'shore up' the doghouse/run and the garage where the barn cats live in the winter time to block out as much wind as humanly possible. It seems counter-intuitive that chickens need ventilation rather than protection from the wind? The large shed is not insulated and by no means 'wind proof'. Right now it has one large window that was just open (old glass had long since been broken out of it and cleaned up) and I've put a wire screen over it and intend to close it off with plywood in the winter. With the size of the shed and the fact that it is not remotely 'airtight', do I need to be adding other ventilation? It does not have wall/peak vents at the roofline. The roof has a fairly steep pitch and starts at the ceiling rafters which are a good 12 feet high and then go up from there, as this was once a small 'machine' shed. I don't even care if the chickens eventually get to where they can fly high enough to be in the rafters, but is this a problem? (Other than bird poop on the head?
)
2. One of my chicken-owning friends insists that I should 'box off' a portion of this shed for the chickens as they don't "need" so much room. Another of my chicken-owning friends says her chickens live in a similar space and are fine. One says she does 'nothing special' in the winter and just accepts that she has little to no egg production during that time, while another does the heat lamp/light so that she can continue to harvest eggs. Which is better/healthier for the chickens? I had planned to put in a heat lamp/light source because I'm worried about them being too cold. I also plan to have a heated water source. Since there aren't any bugs/plants/grass to speak of in the winter time, is it better to let them naturally slow/stop production during those months? Do I really need to 'box off' part of the shed? We don't use it for anything else at all, and I'd rather not spend money dividing up the space inside, as we plan to expand the outside run as our budget allows us to buy fencing.
3. Do they need to be fed 'grit'? Again, back to friends that do/friends that don't. I'm told because mine will have significant parts of the day (6-8 hours) where they will completely 'free range' in the large yard, that they will naturally find/pick up whatever they need for grit. But my yard is pretty much all grass lawn and trees. I wouldn't want them getting deliberately in the road in search of gravel/rocks. I expect to supply oyster shell supplement when they approach laying age - is that sufficient for 'grit' or do I need something more?
4. Thieson's had several different breeds and they all looked pretty/interesting. I did absolutely zero research on breeds other than the information cards hanging above each bin of chicks. :/ We bought 3 each of 4 different breed varieties - and they are beautiful birds! But now that I am reading more about specific breeds, I'm learning (as I should have assumed) that there is a great deal of variation in personality and such among breeds. So far all the girls seem to get along very well, though there is definitely a 'pecking order'. Do I need to worry about safety/combativeness between breeds? I have Americana, Barred Rock, Rhode Island Red and one that was just 'Heavy Breed'. One of the Americanas is significantly larger/bossier than the others. Is there a risk I will have to house them separately?
5. Deep litter method - is my free wood chips risky to use? I bought some stuff at Theison's - don't have the bottle with me - that said it was for deep litter method, says its organic and helps to break down ammonia/keep the litter dry and sprinkle it on once a week, which I have been doing. So far we've had no odor at all.
If you've read this far, thank you!!
I look forward to and appreciate your insight and suggestions.
This year my kids got the bee in their bonnet that they wanted chickens. I spent several months talking to friends and poking around this site and others - but not enough! We have a very large dirt-floor shed on our property that is not being used for anything else. It is roughly the size of two double-car garages placed side by side, long and narrow. We cleaned it up of the usual debris one might expect of an old farm acreage and now have 12 chickens 'living' there. We've had them since May 19th. We bought them as chicks from Thieson's.
We built a roosting area with elevated roosts that the chickens love and have about 6 inches deep of wood-chip mulch covering roughly 1/4 of the shed floor, including beneath the roosting area. The rest of the shed is just open and dirt floor. I am trying the 'deep litter' method, raking up the poopy bits every few days. We have a city yard waste site where city/tree service workers dump the chipped wood from storm damage and anyone can have the wood chips for free. I've used this as yard mulch and dog-kennel bedding for years. You have to rake through it a bit to get the 'good' chips and not any trash that might have been tossed in, but it's decent quality stuff over all. The downside is you have no way of knowing what varieties of trees the wood comes from and I've read that some can be bad for chickens, cedar I think?
We have put in a 'doggie door' and a rather small-ish outdoor run right now - it is irregularly shaped as we just used supplies we had around the place to enclose it sides and top. I read a lot about how to 'coop train' them and we have never had a problem getting them into the shed - though they were very reluctant to LEAVE it when we first built the run/doggie door. When our dog is outside/unsupervised, the chickens can be in the run. When we get home from work and bring her in, we let the chickens out to the whole yard (2.5 acres) to 'free range' and then let the dog out again for a bedtime potty break after the chickens are inside the shed again. Our dog does a GREAT job of keeping away varmints but she would absolutely eat the chickens! We've closed up every largish hole in the shed.
We have not yet built nesting boxes/space. The chickens are very young - they still 'cheep' instead of 'cluck' and don't have full combs yet and such, though they are now bigger than the barn cats or at least as big as, and have full feathers. We're estimating laying to start not before October based on what Thieson's told us.
My questions, along with some explanation:
1. I keep reading the importance of ventilation, especially in the winter and I am confused. We have very cold/windy winters and I usually go out of my way to 'shore up' the doghouse/run and the garage where the barn cats live in the winter time to block out as much wind as humanly possible. It seems counter-intuitive that chickens need ventilation rather than protection from the wind? The large shed is not insulated and by no means 'wind proof'. Right now it has one large window that was just open (old glass had long since been broken out of it and cleaned up) and I've put a wire screen over it and intend to close it off with plywood in the winter. With the size of the shed and the fact that it is not remotely 'airtight', do I need to be adding other ventilation? It does not have wall/peak vents at the roofline. The roof has a fairly steep pitch and starts at the ceiling rafters which are a good 12 feet high and then go up from there, as this was once a small 'machine' shed. I don't even care if the chickens eventually get to where they can fly high enough to be in the rafters, but is this a problem? (Other than bird poop on the head?
)2. One of my chicken-owning friends insists that I should 'box off' a portion of this shed for the chickens as they don't "need" so much room. Another of my chicken-owning friends says her chickens live in a similar space and are fine. One says she does 'nothing special' in the winter and just accepts that she has little to no egg production during that time, while another does the heat lamp/light so that she can continue to harvest eggs. Which is better/healthier for the chickens? I had planned to put in a heat lamp/light source because I'm worried about them being too cold. I also plan to have a heated water source. Since there aren't any bugs/plants/grass to speak of in the winter time, is it better to let them naturally slow/stop production during those months? Do I really need to 'box off' part of the shed? We don't use it for anything else at all, and I'd rather not spend money dividing up the space inside, as we plan to expand the outside run as our budget allows us to buy fencing.
3. Do they need to be fed 'grit'? Again, back to friends that do/friends that don't. I'm told because mine will have significant parts of the day (6-8 hours) where they will completely 'free range' in the large yard, that they will naturally find/pick up whatever they need for grit. But my yard is pretty much all grass lawn and trees. I wouldn't want them getting deliberately in the road in search of gravel/rocks. I expect to supply oyster shell supplement when they approach laying age - is that sufficient for 'grit' or do I need something more?
4. Thieson's had several different breeds and they all looked pretty/interesting. I did absolutely zero research on breeds other than the information cards hanging above each bin of chicks. :/ We bought 3 each of 4 different breed varieties - and they are beautiful birds! But now that I am reading more about specific breeds, I'm learning (as I should have assumed) that there is a great deal of variation in personality and such among breeds. So far all the girls seem to get along very well, though there is definitely a 'pecking order'. Do I need to worry about safety/combativeness between breeds? I have Americana, Barred Rock, Rhode Island Red and one that was just 'Heavy Breed'. One of the Americanas is significantly larger/bossier than the others. Is there a risk I will have to house them separately?
5. Deep litter method - is my free wood chips risky to use? I bought some stuff at Theison's - don't have the bottle with me - that said it was for deep litter method, says its organic and helps to break down ammonia/keep the litter dry and sprinkle it on once a week, which I have been doing. So far we've had no odor at all.
If you've read this far, thank you!!
I look forward to and appreciate your insight and suggestions.
