A Chicken Coop for the Pending Chocolate Orpingtons

My friend had offered to come help me construct this chicken coop, and i was thinking that’d be a good idea in case someone needed to hold a piece in place or against another piece while the other one used the drill. However, the anxiety disorder/adhd combo is a very effective pairing for getting things …

Demolition Day

My original plan with the old chicken pen was to take down the old coop with a drill and a sledgehammer and build the new coop inside. That way, i wouldnt have to take the sides, roof, or buried part of the fencing down, which seemed more complicated to me. Well, that idea got poo …

Constructing the Second Chicken Pen

I should probably start at the beginning. The chicken coop was about 5 and a half years old at the point where it began sagging around the nesting box area and pieces of wood on the front of it as well as parts of the door began falling off. I knew the carpenter ants had …

A Quick Repair to the Chicken Coop Door

The chicken coop has been repaired a few times now. Chickens like to peck and pry at anything shiny. So of course the chicken coop screws had to be silver. They’ve removed a few and ive had to put in little black replacements. They’ve also worn down the wood the door ledge was screwed into …

Poultry Lice

There are no pictures of this debacle as i was a bit too tied up with the events at hand to set up a camera to document the whole thing. I discovered lice crawling on my chickens one day when i parted their feathers while petting them and noticed these long, slender beige bugs just …

The Danger in being a part-time Homesteader

I could title this story “the unwelcome intruder” but i decided instead to call it what it is; a failure on my part. Being that i am not a full-time homesteader; i do leave the property to go to my day job in order to pay the bills, the homestead is not always my primary …

Ellis and Oakley reach Puberty

One day i noticed something tiny and round lying in the shavings in the stock tank. Upon further inspection, it was an egg. It could only have come from one of the two juvenile chickens, Ellis or Oakley. Yet, they weren’t supposed to be of laying age for another month. Well, the following day, there …

Warm Chicken Eggs

Occasionally i would have accidentally good timing and happen upon a chicken egg in the nesting box that was still warm. None of my hens were broody so i could only assume it had been laid recently. There was something about a perfectly smooth warm chicken egg that felt infinitely more special than the refrigerated …

A Long-Overdue Cleaning

When i injured my foot i realized that my ankle was probably not going to tolerate fifteen to twenty minutes of squatting in cramped conditions underneath roosting bars while i wore gloves and a mask to scoop shavings into a trash bag with my hands. The tray was meant to slide in and out from …