This is our big coop, where we keep the meat chickens. It doubles as a storage area for my mowers, tiller, etc.
The meat birds inside.
This is the little coop where our egg hens will reside.
This is the inside of the little coop. We are putting a concrete floor in and still need to build the roosts and nesting boxes.
A couple days ago, we finished putting up the fence for their run. Since we live in town, we don't have the option to free range, so we wanted to give them as large a run as possible. The sandbox is filled with diatomaceous earth and we are leaving the tree limb there for them to "play" on.
Great digs! WONDERFUL play area which your chickens will absolutely LOVE.
Whoops - don't want to put a damper on your box of DE but here's an article about DE that made me give away my expensive unopened pure white food grade DE:
http://www.the-chicken-chick.com/2012/05/diatomaceous-earth-de-benefitrisk.html
My DE bag had more warnings than a bottle of lye. If it had that much potential risk to humans that have to wear a mask and/or goggles to protect eyes/lungs then I didn't want to risk my chicken's smaller eyes/lungs. Chickens get a lot of respiratory issues easily - from certain kinds of ash sometimes including supposedly safe wood ash, DE, Sevin dust, and even certain chemicals or fumes (like cedar wood and cedar chips emissions, etc). I just let them use plain ole' dirt for dust-baths (I may invest in a very little bit of ordinary sand to mix in my hard dirt in their raised dust-bath box but VERY little). I use organic Poultry Protector spray per label directions on each chicken 1x a month and in the cracks/crevices of their nestboxes and perches during cleanout and I've been lice/mite free for 3 years now. My egg-seller friend used DE and says there's no results using it and will not purchase another bag for her flock - especially with all the warnings on the label and all the snake-oil cures it supposedly covers - a little suspect to us and just a gimmick to lure uninformed chickeneers into purchasing the expensive stuff. Chickens have been using dirt-bathing successfully for centuries so why fix something that ain't broke?
Everyone needs to make up their own minds and it took me 3 months staring at my DE bag before I chose to go the way of caution on something that has 50/50 risks. I have had such success with Poultry Protector especially since it's organically safe that I don't regret giving away my DE bag for one moment. I've had quite a bit of discussions with experienced chickeneers on other BYC threads and many are beginning to doubt or have completely discontinue DE use from their own experiences - and especially on their delicate babies. Many couldn't figure out why some of their chickens were coming down with recurring respiratory infections. I personally have had a couple Leghorns who wee notorious sneezers just from ordinary dust - I can't imagine how they'd react to foreign additives like powders, dusts, and fumes.
I am so jealous of all the room you have LOL! I miss our old 25 acres and even though I am retired in a city zone now I still think of my farm roots! Our backyard chickens still give us a little feel of the old Country Life. Have you ever watched "Green Acres" with Eva Gabor and Eddie Albert? That was how I started out farm life as a kid - open walls leading directly outside, no electricity, a WWII barracks later converted to our farmhouse, an old Stagecoach, Buckboard, Horsedrawn Plow, Steamer Trunk, and Tack Room items from the late 1800's left in the barn (the property used to be an old Stagecoach Stop) really interesting stuff I never appreciated when I was a kid!
