Hidden Forest Coop

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Excited to come back to this thread. Two years ago I visited you and you gave me a coop tour. I had to put off coop-building for a while to move houses, but now we are ready! I love this thread and just re-read it all. I am pretty excited about the building phase! I have three more questions:

1) If you had to start from the beginning, would you construct the coop and run differently? How is the size, sturdiness, storage capacity, cleaning capabilities?

2) Does the food stay fresh, not rot or get moldy?

3) How has the deep litter method worked on a regular maintance basis, and where do you put the poop from the coop?

Thank you again for this incredible resource.
 
Things that I would change.... I think like a lot of people have found, I would have made it a little bigger but the current size works fine for 9 chickens and probably would be good for up to about 12.

I have made another change to the coop last fall (that I hadn't documented here) when I added three chicks to the flock. I put a internal fence below the hen house to keep the new chicks until the older hens got used to them. It also had a tiny doorway they could use to go into the other part of the run but the older hens couldn't follow them back into the chick area. It was positioned so that half of the drinking nipples were on each side of the fence. This picture doesn't show the tiny doorway but it was just a chick size hole I cut in the hardware cloth. I used it for about four weeks before mixing them all together.



I then took that framed fence and turned it into a shelf below the outside roost to create another level in the outside run area. It kind-of adds roughly another 12 square feet to the run. If I was to redo it, I'd make it where the litter could be a little deeper in the shelf because they tend to kick it out after a few days. The bottom of it is hardware cloth so their roost poops eventually filter down to the dirt part of the run below it.

From this, I had the idea that I could drop the floor level of the hen house 6-10" and change out the floor material from OSB wood to the hardware cloth. That way, I might be able to get away with putting 12" to 18" of litter under the hen house roost (instead of sand) and their poops would just eventually trickle down through the litter and hardware cloth into the dirt of the run (just like their run roost). That would save me from having to scoop their poops in the hen house. I haven't tried this yet because there is so much stuff that I currently have under the hen house floor (electronics for webcams, the water tank, pumps and hoses) but I think it might work. During the winter, it might even help the hen house stay a little warmer.

Absolutely no problems with moldy food. The PVC pipe holds about two weeks of food for them and after it emerges at the bottom, it probably only sits for a few days in the trough.

The deep litter method has been great, along with the sand in hen house and fake turf in the nest boxes. I was originally taking the poop out of the sand roughly every day and putting it into my compost pile but I've now switched to just dumping it into the run. It disappears very quickly and has never overloaded the run. I do a total clean-out in the fall, move everything into my compost pile and then fill the run with fall leaves. In the spring, I do a total clean-out again and fill it with leaves I've saved from the fall or a hay bale (if I have one available).

Safety wise, it has been great. We've had many raccoons, dogs, hawks, owls and probably other things interested in the chickens. I've found evidence of something trying to dig into the coop but they didn't get very far and the chickens have been perfectly safe.
 
I made a change to the raised run area under the roost. I added a wall to one side so that it holds a deeper amount of leaves. This helps a lot with them kicking all the litter out.




For my next experiment, I added about 10" of litter to the bottom of the hen house (replacing the 2" layer of sand that I had in there). Before, I'd have to scoop the sand every other day to keep it at a reasonable level of cleanliness and smell. Eventually, I'm going to change the flooring under the litter in the hen house to hardware cloth but this works pretty well right now. The hardware cloth floor will also let me make the litter about 6 more inches deeper. It's been three weeks since I've done this and for the most part, it takes care of itself. I've did have a slight problem with the chickens making nests and laying it it but they've stopped doing that now that it has warmed up and I've opened the windows. At the worst, throwing a few mealworms in there will get the chickens to stir things up. I think it's a great change so that my pet sitters don' have to fool with cleaning anything when I'm away from the house. The only thing the'll have to do now is pickup the eggs.



 
This latest cold snap froze my chicken nipples. My water tank (which is insulated) was fine but the pipes to the nipples froze up so I created an insulated box to wrap around them (since the chickens would eat the insulation otherwise).

IMG_5126.png
 

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