Author: Anna & Mark

We’re pawning off our
problematic Light
Sussex on my brother, so it seemed only fair to come over and help
him build a chicken coop.  We threw it together in two and a half
hours and the only storebought materials were about $20 worth of
hinges, screws, and brackets.  Although you’re highly unlikely to
have the same found materials on hand, I thought you might enjoy seeing
the process.



The trick to building
well with scrap is to spend a few weeks pondering before you
start.  Joey had his coop all planned out before we even got
there.  He lives back in the woods where there are probably plenty
of predators, and he didn’t want to have to shut the chickens in every
night, so he envisioned a high rise chicken coop a bit like the ones
he’d seen in Central America.  The chickens will walk up a long
ramp and enter through the top of the coop.

Joey had found two solid wood
doors, which he planned to use as the main structural elements. 
Mark suggested working up against a tree since the support makes it
easy to build ramshackle coops by yourself.  Within minutes, we
had nearly half of the coop in place.



Next, Joey took apart an
old car top carrier to turn into the roof.  The parts unbolted
easily, so if Joey wants to go on a trip, he can just remove the roof
from his coop and put the cargo carrier back together.  (He’d
better hope for sunny weather, though, for the chickens’ sake.)



(You may be noticing a
theme here — Joey and Mark did the work while Daddy and I stood
around and looked pretty.)

We needed a support to
form the corner across from the doors, so Joey cut an old two by four
to size.  He lives in an off-grid,
underground house, so he did all the sawing by  hand. 
Mark and I are less hardy, so we brought a power drill to make
fastening faster.

The other materials Joey had
in abundance were old cabinet doors.  They just happened to be the
same length as the bigger doors were wide, which made it easy to use
the cabinet doors to fill in the other two walls.  We hinged three
of the pieces to make access doors — one in the front at the top for
the chickens to go in and two on the side to make an extra large egg
access hatch.  (You can’t see it, but there’s a nest box inside
behind the darkest cabinet door.)



Before we closed the
coop in too much, we also added perches.  Joey had an old mop
handle which he cut in half to make two corner perches.  (You can
barely see them in the photo to the left.)  Then, just below the
top access door, we added a longer perch made out of two by
fours.  The idea is that the chickens come up the ramp, walk onto
that perch, then hop down to the nest box using the corner perches as
aids.

Here’s the nearly
finished coop.  Joey’s going to add a few more hinges on the
various access doors (we only brought three hinges) and some smaller
boards to the ramp to give the flock better flooting.  I’m looking
forward to seeing whether our Sussex are bright enough to make this
inventive coop work.



We’ll send Joey home
with three hens, a rooster, and an automatic chicken waterer to make daily
care a breeze.  He’ll just have to supply deep
bedding material and some chicken feed.

Writing
about mangels as chicken feed seems to be a popular sport.  I wish
I could find more reports on whether the birds actually eat
these huge fodder beets.



My experience with
feeding tough, raw vegetables to chickens is a bit spotty.  If I
cut a winter squash in half and make sure it lands flesh side up, the
chickens do peck away at it, and they eventually seem to find thickly
sliced sweet potatoes as well.  I’ve yet to see them eat carrots I
toss in the coop, though.



One option for making root
crops more enticing would be to cut up mangels, potatoes, and other
homegrown fodder vegetables, then toss them in a pot of water on top of
the wood stove when I damp it down for the night.  Possibly they
would cook (rather than burn), and I’m positive our chickens would eat
any of these foods when softened by heat.



Another recommendation I
read involves grating mangels before feeding them to chickens. 
Maybe if you have some kind of grain mill or large food processor, that
technique would work, but I know for a fact I wouldn’t manage to feed
many mangels if I grated them by hand.  (I’m not so sure I’d even
get around to cooking them.)



A third option I ran across
consists of mounting a spike on the side of the chicken coop and
impaling tough vegetables on it.  The sweet potato (or mangel) is
held off the ground, so it catches the flock’s eye and doesn’t roll
away as they peck at it.  This method sounds right up my alley, so
I’m experimenting now with a sweet potato.  I’ll let you know
whether the tasty root goes down my chickens’ gullets in a timely
manner.