Author: Anna & Mark

Low budget automatic chicken feeder

October 22, 2012 Posts 2 Comments

Automatic chicken feederIn addition to experimenting
to see how
much you can tilt chicken nipples, Michael also cobbled
together a very nice automatic feeder for less than $6.  He wrote:


The important part is the roof vent from a
4″ water heater vent turned upside down and screwed to a board to keep
it from being over-turned by the chickens….I was buying parts for the
building I’m putting up near Burbank and saw this vent
thingie….nearby was an adaptor to go from 4″ to 5″ and then the weird
cap was from an old floor furnace exhaust vent that I took from the
house when I put in Central Heat this winter. I needed something to
cover the open “top” to keep the rain and mice out and that old vent
top just fit. What luck.



I’ll send another photo of a feeder I
made from stuff at the second-hand store – $2 worth of candy dish and a
plastic basket….Nothing’s too good for these chickens!



We posted a couple of
years ago about a PVC
pipe automatic feeder
and would love to hear from readers who have made other easy (and
cheap) feeders.



Meanwhile, don’t forget
to try out automatic chicken waterer to expedite the other half
of your daily chicken chores.

Homemade automatic chicken feeder

October 22, 2012 Posts 2 Comments
Automatic chicken feeder

Chicken bucket waterer
A
week ago, Mark and I went to visit Missy and Everett from Living a Simple Life. 
They kindly took us on a tour of their new homestead, and we snapped a
lot
of photos of their automatic chicken feeder.



Their turkey and
chickens run free most of the time, but now and then
Everett and Missy like to leave home and shut the flock in to protect
them from predators.  They installed two of our chicken bucket
waterers to keep the
poultry hydrated, then constructed their own
automatic chicken feeder so the birds will never go hungry.



The feeder is simply a
collection of sections of PVC pipe and elbows
that allows chicken feed to fall by gravity into a trough at the
bottom.  If you fill up the entire pipe with feed, you can go out
of town for several days without worrying about your flock.



In the turkey pen,
Everett has a slightly different setup — he placed
an elbow on the bottom of the vertical pipe so that the turkey can
stick in her long neck and peck up the feed.  However, when Mama
Turkey hatched out a chicken baby, the new chick just wasn’t big enough
to poke its head in the elbow and find the food.  Instead, Everett
turned the elbow downwards.  So that side of the coop no longer
has an automatic feeder, but it does have a handy shoot through which
Everett can drop cups of feed without having to walk into the turkey’s
pen.

Foraging patterns of six week old chicks

October 22, 2012 Posts 3 Comments
Chicks and oilseed radish

Four to seven weeks is
my favorite chick age.  They’re just barely starting to get into
trouble — hopping up on the porch, scratching mulch — but mostly
are simply growing like crazy and rustling up lots of their own grub.


Chickens in the garden

Each morning, the flock
has to make a hard decision — which delicious morsel to eat first!


Chicken and asparagus

Oilseed radishes and
asparagus berries are favorites right now.


Chicks in raspberries

After breakfast, it’s
time for a short siesta.  The raspberry
patch makes a safe
haven for napping.


Chicks on the porch

Then they’re back to
work!


Chicks in mulch

The straw I used for
this kill mulch clearly had more seeds in it than it should have. 
“No problem,” said my chicks.  “We’re on it!”


Evening chickens

They forage until dusk,
then put themselves to bed. 


Chicks going to bed

All I have to do is
close the door.



(If you were looking for
a little more substance, you might want to read this
post about the advantages of free range chickens, and this
one about the flip side of the coin.  For more fun chick
photos, check out this post
from a month ago.)


Our chicken waterer keeps our
flock healthy with lots of clean water.