I may be wrong, but you'll get more solar gain using clear plastic. It's also dual purpose. you can warm the soil with it, then use it for a tunnel after the plants are out of the ground.
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Thanks for sharing what you did--so far we've had our chickens in a coop that moves onto fresh ground every few days spring through fall but have just kept them in a coop for the winter months (in NY just east of Lake Ontario--lots of snow) This summer we'll be building new space for rabbits and chickens and wanted to give the chickens outside access. Your post gives me ideas of what we could do. Thanks!My chooks have a "sun room." I took three 8-foot long (each about 4 feet wide) sections of old fencing, tops attached to the east side of their coop, bottoms out at about a 45-degree angle from the coop resting on straw bales, with the whole thing covered with an old green house skin. The dirt in there is heavily mulched with leaves and straw so they can dig around in it. I did this so I did not have to do any snow shoveling for them this year. It has worked out great, and the chooks really love it in there. I also did this on the west side of the coop for the turkeys. Because of the slop of the land, the turkeys had to have two levels of straw bales to get the bottoms of the fencing sections up high enough.
Once it warms up, end of April or so, I plan to remove the green house skin and grow scarlet runner beans, squash, pumpkins, and such (maybe some of you can come up with some other ideas) planted into the straw bales (straw bale gardening) with the vines trained to grow up the fencing to create a shaded area for them, to keep the coop cooler, and to grow some food for them. Any thoughts/suggestions in this regard are welcome!!
I noticed Rainy's avatar too!! A welcome tease as this has been the ( almost) the snowiest winter on record, and the coldest February for certain. THe endless pure white snow is truely a wonder to look at . . . .however I'm looking forward to spring!!
Rainy you are ahead of most of us. Love that you can just poke in cuttings and get a ready made fence AND feed for the goats. Great.
Generally speaking we have not attempted to jump into balancing rations. Depending on how much the birds eat, greens and fresh vegies could disrupt the balance of their feed. I too struggle with the useless labeling that is allowed. My old feed company listed specific ingredients. I think it is fair to say that the ration is balance so the addition of anything more to eat needs to be balanced to. Now steps in reality . . . we are bound to cause imbalance . . . . but does it really matter might be the important question.