Michigan Thread - all are welcome!

[1muttsfan]

Flint - Saginaw - Bay City

 

[justincasei812]

Folly’s place- I think that the nearest Farm & Home is in Clare, which is an hour away. Heading over to TSC tomorrow to see what breeds they have and hopefully a selection.

 

[WhatAboutBob?]

TSC in Gaylord has Orps, Australorps, Cornish, and Assorted Bantams that are mostly Silver and Gold Sebrights. Oh, and Ducks.

 

[1muttsfan]

TSC in West Branch has white Leghorn pullets, Cornish, Australorps, assorted bantams (probably American Game), and cute little brown ducks.

 

[gladahmae]

Heading over to TSC tomorrow to see what breeds they have and hopefully a selection.

I always let my fingers do the driving and call the stores to ask what they have available unless I'm going to be out of the house for something anyway. Much less chance of me "accidentally" coming home with chicks that way.



Has anyone in here gotten chicks from the guy in columbiaville that posts on CL all the time? He has some breeds I'd like, but I've had some sketchy CL experiences with really questionable setups/conditions and I don't want to ask DH to stop there if we'd be better off looking elsewhere.

 

[gladahmae]

I’ve been puzzling over my run renovations, and I *might* have come up with a decent idea that wouldn’t require me to rip everything out and spend a lot of money. Pic of current setup so you can picture/critique for me. (Background info: my run for my larger coop currently consists of a 4ft chainlink fence and that’s it. No roof, no apron, just the fence. Birds that can/want to fly out have and they free range out to around 100 yards of the coop. We have a lot of sumac to the west and south, and hardwoods to the east, house and yard the dogs stay in are to the north. We haven’t had very many for-sure predator losses, but last year was pretty awful as some birds flat out went missing, and something tried to dig into my grow out coop.)


My idea is to get some aviary netting and install screw-in hooks just under the eaves of the big coop (on the right) and a 2nd set of hook to the side of the run for my smaller coop (on the left) and stretch the netting across and create a “lid” for that part of the run that I can take down in the winter because we get a LOT of snow in the winter. Make the fence taller along the front and back sides to secure the aviary netting to, add an apron (of course.)

Other pic is my current small coop run. 2x4 welded wire with a hc apron, chain link on the roof. I’m not opposed to building another one of these, but it would be a significantly larger time and money commitment for the size I would want as there will be around 20 chickens in the big coop and I keep around 8 in the smaller coop.

 

[chickflick]

We did not have a good vibes from that guy in columbiaville. Took a rooster there and he just kind of threw him in a run. Friend got a chicken from him just because she felt sorry for it. Single chicken with a bunch of roos. Said the hen was just a year or two old but figured it was much older than that. Was in poor shape.
But, that was years ago. Maybe he cleaned up his act.

 

[1muttsfan]

unless you need to disassembled the run you don't need to install hooks to hang the poultry netting, you can just staple it up. Use lots of staples though, and get the heavy-duty type - the lighter-weight stuff a hawk can go right through. Also if you put a pole in the middle, with a bucket or something else smooth over the top of it to support the netting, you should not have snow load problems as long as you make sure to knock the snow off and not let it build up.
My run is built with cedar posts, with chicken wire, and hardware cloth on the bottom. The hardware cloth is buried about 10" underground. It would have been deeper, but the ground is so rocky here I had to dig the trenches with a pickaxe. I had some slab cedar and I stapled the fencing to that and then buried all of it under ground.
The heavy-duty poultry netting covering is stapled with small u-shaped fencing staples all the way around to the horizontal posts and the coop wall, and has a vertical and horizontal posts that hold it up in the center. I have seen hawks bounce off of this like a trampoline.

 

[Folly's place]

I agree with chickflick; get chicks from a safe choice, not a dealer.
Mary

 

[gladahmae]

Re: the netting idea for the run. I can’t get int the run during the winter, so being able to take the net down would be the easiest thing. I coop everyone from end of December until March usually (depending on when the snow starts sticking.)


Re: the chicks on CL
He appears to order pullets from townline or someone, but he also has breeder coops of quite a few things. I would really like lavender orps and dh will be down to Detroit at the end of the month and could pick chicks up for me on the way home. I can not justify spending $20/chick from Meyer.


We built the hover brooder today. Gratuitous pictures since there always seems to be requests for those. It’s out in the growout coop now with a thermometer under it so I can get a sense of how warm the current bulbs are keeping it. It’ll also save the high and low temps so I will be able to tell how it does overnight.