Author: Anna & Mark

If you’re putting your chicken waterer in a
coop, it’s pretty simply to hang most bucket waterers from a
rafter or to set
them on the edge of a shelf.  But mounting gets more dicey in a pasture
setting, unless you bring in a plant
hanger.



One of our goals with
the EZ Miser
was to make it even simpler to mount outdoors.  The very
easiest mounting method is to set
the EZ Miser on top of a cinder block or two, but Mark has already
started experimenting with other alternatives.  The option
shown above and to the left uses a Christmas-tree stand, along
with a bit of lumber and a four scrap pieces of PVC pipe. 
The most-appropriate support post for this stand would have been a
four-by-four, but Mark only had two-by-fours on hand, so he put
two together to fit into the Christmas-tree base.  The shelf
is a scrap of one-by-four, with holes drilled in the corners with
a hole saw, then little pieces of
PVC pipe slipped in the indentations to keep the EZ Miser from
moving around.

Mark’s second mounting method took advantage
of a stump left over from clearing the pasture.  He could
have simply leveled the top of the stump and put the EZ Miser
there, but that seemed to require more skill than just adding a
couple of scrap boards to level the surface.  Mark used the
same pipe bumpers on the sides, a method that seems to have been
sufficient to keep the waterer from tipping even when the rooster
hopped on top.



Mark has some other
mounting ideas up his sleeve, so I’ll keep you posted as they show
up in the pastures.  In the meantime, I’d love to see your EZ
Misers in action, especially if the photo shows how they’re
mounted.  Email info@avianaquamiser.com
and I’ll add your photos to the blog!

About a month ago, we
put a couple of hens in our old chicken tractor for the
first time in years.  I was looking forward to their
scratching and fertilizing powers in the garden (and to not having
those unruly hens flying fences), but I hadn’t realized how nice
it would feel to have a couple of “pet” chickens again.



There’s something
about a tractored chicken that just feels very different from our
pastured flock.  Our two tractor hens quickly took to the
lifestyle and began looking forward to my approach every
day.  In fact, when the nest box door popped open during a
move and they escaped, the hens were already so tame that
“catching” them was as simple as opening the big door, sprinkling
their breakfast on the ground inside, and then waiting for both
hens to hop back into their home.

I’ll probably get
sick of my tractored hens once winter really hits and tractoring
turns the ground to mud.  But who knows?  Maybe it’ll be
worthwhile to keep two hens in a tractor year round.