The Square Foot Question

[MamaBear46]

thank you Erin

 

[Erin~TheChickenLover]

thank you Erin

Your welcome

 

[chickencoop789]

It is recommended that chickens have 4 sq feet of space per bird in the coop and 10 sq feet of space per bird in the run. More coop space is needed if you get winters. More space is needed for turkeys.

x2

 

[FrozenCanadian]

Ok, thank you everyone for your input!

I appreciate

Having all that in mind, it will also help me design my friend's coop and run, all integrated with a treehouse for his children along with a swingset

 

[laura625]

Canadian.
I hope to build a treehouse for my chickens.
If the birds are going to live in this space 24hrs a day, I would consider 5 chickens the maximum in there for a long winter..
Besides what has alteady been me.tioned,
stressed chickens have lowerred resistance to illness,infestations
and such.
Fewr chickens would mean better air quality i would imagine.
I have long cold wintrs here, and I am thinking of trying to get some Chanteclear chckens. Have you considerred them?

 

[FrozenCanadian]

Canadian.
I hope to build a treehouse for my chickens.
If the birds are going to live in this space 24hrs a day, I would consider 5 chickens the maximum in there for a long winter..
Besides what has alteady been me.tioned,
stressed chickens have lowerred resistance to illness,infestations
and such.
Fewr chickens would mean better air quality i would imagine.
I have long cold wintrs here, and I am thinking of trying to get some Chanteclear chckens. Have you considerred them?

Hi Laura, I haven't quite mastered the art of distinguishing between chickens yet, other than bare-bones basics. I will look into it! But I have those red/rust hens with a bit of white on them as well as Leghorns.

Speaking about treehouses, that is exactly what I will do at a friend's house in two weeks. they built for their children a tree house two years ago and it's "suspended" 8 feet in the air. My task in a build a coop right under it. It will be a 4X6 contruction. The run will be 8X10 and 5 chickens will go in there.

Getting back to my square footage thing, I will have 8 hens in my setup. After receiving your input, I'll either have to build another coop and run (well, that would be fun ) or give 2 or 3 hens to another friend of mine.

However, there are good news! I still had a 30 foot roll of rabbit wire. It's really tough compared to chicken wire and when I unrolled it, I realised that it could stand on its own! So this evening, I unrolled the thing just outside the run, thus giving them about 70 extra square feet, but with grass instead of sand. I guess I could call it "Semi free-range". Best thing is, I can move the wire around so the hens will never turn my grass into a mud field. So I now have about 22 square feet coop space, 50 square feet run space and 70 square feet grass space.

I don't know how you guys view this, but I believe that I have just improved on their happiness a little bit. Quite chuffed up about it

Good night!

 

[janinepeters]

Good job there, Frozen. More space is always better, IMO. Rotating the run space is a great idea, but the grass space is still pretty small and I suspect each time you let the chx loose on a given patch, they will scratch it to bare ground in no time, and there won't be time for the other patches to green up. Not sure - just my hunch based on what I've seen with chickens.

The other thing to realize is that it is not just a question of space, grass or no grass. If allowed, chickens love to forage where there is a diversity of plant life - among not just grasses, but herbaceous and woody plants. The reason is that it offers a lot more variety in terms of both plant and insect foods. So given that you are limited in terms of space, maybe the way to go is to think about what you can do to provide more plant and bug foraging opportunity in the space you have. You cannot do that with plantings, because they will scratch them to nothing in no time. People put protected plantings in runs, but protected means the chickens can't really forage in them.

If I were limited to the space you have, I would consider putting a compost bin in the run, where you dump yard and garden waste, and kitchen fruit/veg scraps. Get the compost cooking, keep it moist and turn periodically, and it will bring in worms and bugs. You can mix the poop/litter from the coop into the compost, too. Chickens will keep busy picking through the compost for both the scraps and the worms/bugs, and in the process will recycle all that waste to nice rich compost for your garden.

 

[FrozenCanadian]

The other thing to realize is that it is not just a question of space, grass or no grass. If allowed, chickens love to forage where there is a diversity of plant life - among not just grasses, but herbaceous and woody plants. The reason is that it offers a lot more variety in terms of both plant and insect foods. So given that you are limited in terms of space, maybe the way to go is to think about what you can do to provide more plant and bug foraging opportunity in the space you have. You cannot do that with plantings, because they will scratch them to nothing in no time. People put protected plantings in runs, but protected means the chickens can't really forage in them.

If I were limited to the space you have, I would consider putting a compost bin in the run, where you dump yard and garden waste, and kitchen fruit/veg scraps. Get the compost cooking, keep it moist and turn periodically, and it will bring in worms and bugs. You can mix the poop/litter from the coop into the compost, too. Chickens will keep busy picking through the compost for both the scraps and the worms/bugs, and in the process will recycle all that waste to nice rich compost for your garden.

Hi Janine, I built a 4X4 compost bin out of scrap wood when I built my house in 2009. The bin is directly under the kitchen window and people find it brillant. The thing is, it is 6 feet away from the coop and run and I cannot "connect" them together for free chicken access. So every now and then, I pick up the hens and put them there for a while. This being said, I will look into building a more modest compost bin and attach it to the run.

With regards to the grass and plant diversity question, I thought about it yesterday while I unrolled my rabbit wire. The system being light and easily transportable, the idea is to move the thing every 2 or three days so that I don't end up having a mud field. There are three different "patches" I can cover, of which two contain "Plate-Bandes" (What the heck is that in English, a Flowerbed?) where they can fuss around. I don't really mind having a few flowers yanked off here and there.

All this is due to the fact that I only have a 6 000 square feet lot on which sits my house, the garage and a large 16X16 deck as well as very large Plate-Bandes (flowerbed?).

So you folks all guessed that my eventual ambition is to find a place our in the boonies where I'll have a much bigger yard. This chicken thing gets to be quite addictive and I'm always trying to figure out how I can add hens and coops.

 

[janinepeters]

Frozen, the compost bin does sound brilliant! As far as moving the fencing, you'll have to play it by ear, but I'm guessing that all 3 patches will become bare ground because the unused 2 won't have time to recover while the chickens are on the other. You might find that they yank or trample quite a bit more than a few flowers here and there. I don't mean to be critical, and I do understand the space limitation. It can be very hard to keep chickens in a way that allows them to express their natural instincts and still be safe. We struggled with that for at least a year, and even now we have to grapple with management issues (aggression, feather picking) from time to time. And yes, the chicken thing does seem to be quite addictive for some of us!

 

[FrozenCanadian]

Frozen, the compost bin does sound brilliant! As far as moving the fencing, you'll have to play it by ear, but I'm guessing that all 3 patches will become bare ground because the unused 2 won't have time to recover while the chickens are on the other. You might find that they yank or trample quite a bit more than a few flowers here and there. I don't mean to be critical, and I do understand the space limitation. It can be very hard to keep chickens in a way that allows them to express their natural instincts and still be safe. We struggled with that for at least a year, and even now we have to grapple with management issues (aggression, feather picking) from time to time. And yes, the chicken thing does seem to be quite addictive for some of us!

I forgot to mention that for now, this improvised rabbit wire system-from-Hell of mine will allow the hens about 2 to 3 hours per day. I can't really afford to let them loose in the morning before going to work because we're out in the boonies and I wouldn't want to finish work and return to a stack of feathers. So it's not a perfect setup, but I am satisfied in knowing that I'm eating eggs and taking care of animals that aren't stuck inside a wire cage for industrial purposes.

Well, I'll now go back to daydreaming about having abundant land, 30 hens and two guard dogs, running around all day in the field and playing hide and seek in the woods. (sigh...)