Ribh's D'Coopage

[Ribh]

lol

 

[Ribh]

Most of my married life I've run a vegetable garden ~ some years more successfully than others. While our block is large it is odd shaped & mostly unusable for things like veggie gardens. I have battled our soil ~ a mixture of clay & ironstone ~ sets like cement. After years of mulch & imported soil it was still awful & being on the west side [only place available] fried in summer.

Last year the man built me some raised beds with shade cloth protection from the west, as a surprise but being on the island really good soil had to be imported from the mainland @ huge expense so while I waited I let the girls free range in the existing soil to aerate & fertilise it. Well the soil finally arrived! I was so excited. I've missed 2 growing seasons.

My initial plant is usually bought seedlings while I wait on ours propagating so I bought up big & worked my butt off getting everything in the ground before it rained.

You know how this story ends, don't you. The girls did a massive break out & mowed the lot down before I realised they were out.

So I replanted. We've had rain & humidity. The carrots are already sprouting. The beans are about to flower. Now if I can just manage to keep the girls from finding all this lusciousness....

 

[drumstick diva]

Good luck keeping the girls out of your veggie garden.

 

[Ribh]

Good luck keeping the girls out of your veggie garden.

lol I know! However I have run fencing from our verandah to their coop, effectively penning them on our hillside. They aren't flyers, but the fencing is only temporary until we redo the coop & in a stiff wind is liable to come down. I just have to keep an eye on gaps @ present.

 

[Ribh]

DH & I have nutted out a basic plan for the coop ~ a sort of variation on a Wood's Coop 'cause it just doesn't get that cold round here, low maintenance, as big as we can make it & once built, I will work on adding enough things of interest so eventually the flock will be permanently contained.

 

[Ribh]

I'm not sure if I have a knack of choosing loopy~loop animals or they become that way over time but this is what greets me round about *coop lock~up time*. The girls know & they gather @ the back door & eyeball me with guilt trips.

 

[Ribh]

A different sort of chickabee. They have since turned into hairy monsters with huge ginger beards but they were rather cute @ this size.

 

[Kris5902]

That is the cutest! Your chickens report to your porch door so you can tuck them in at night, or are they trying to convince you to let them into the house? Either way they look like little sweeties!

 

[Ribh]

That is the cutest! Your chickens report to your porch door so you can tuck them in at night, or are they trying to convince you to let them into the house? Either way they look like little sweeties!

Actually I think they want company. They *talk* to me ~ but we have a huge mozzie infestation @ present & outside is not nice. I'm waving a mozzie coil inside the coop before the girls go to roost, they're just so bad.

 

[Ribh]

The new coop has already brought me to tears. What I am good @ is concepts. I understand concepts. What I am not so good @ is explaining those concepts to someone else ~ especially if it involves some sort of mathematical concept. Math & I are not friends.

Now I live in a subtropical climate. Summer nights here can get super hot & sticky. Remembering my very first coop was an upturned trampoline that had a tarp over it when it rained I knew chickens would be perfectly fine, even in winter, without full enclosure so when I read about a woods coop I got really excited. I understood the concept because I had seen it work ~ yeah, in a weird way but...

I get excited & then I get obsessive & I decided that this was the sort of coop I wanted but explaining it to my poor long~suffering hubby, who is a bricklayer, a carpenter & a horticulturalist ~ you know, the super PRACTICAL sort~ was beyond me. I could explain ventilation, ventilation, ventilation & the *sweet spot* where moving air grows still but I have no idea how one makes that happen. Yeah, I know about the 6:1 ratio ~ but seriously... I have no idea what that actually means.

I blathered on about nesting boxes & roosts & accessibility & storage & my man, bless his heart, listened patiently ~ then he produced a mud map. It wasn't what I had in mind AT ALL!

Visualising a 3D object from a 2D drawing is not my forte either. *sigh* So. After I had my melt down Hubby patiently went over everything I'd told him I wanted & explained how that worked out in practical terms given council restrictions on what can go where & what face which way.

It turns out he's provided me with exactly what I asked for. I asked him to add a window ~ not because I think it will need one for ventilation but because I need to be able to check on the girls without actually entering the coop.

So. I will be able to stand up to clean & access my bins. The roof will slop from west to east with ventilation under the western eves. We have no choice in this. We are not supposed to slope the roof towards our neighbour's yard. Storage will be under the coop floor but as the entire front will be open with air flow coming up from below, over & through the western ventilation I shouldn't have trouble cleaning it with a rake. This sheltered area is @ the western end of what should be @ least a 6 X 18' run. Not sure where our drop off point is exactly as there's a bit of a cut back in the hillside @ the end. I am allowed a maximum of 12 chooks, no rooster, but am aiming for between 8 & 10, depending on what breeds are available.

I do prefer the bigger breeds on the whole. They feel less fragile when handling. My breeder does Campines. So pretty. Sussex ~ large enogh & pretty enough for me but I also want wyandottes & may have to look elsewhere for those.