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Chickens Are In and Doing Great...

Stopped by our local feed store, Heretick Feed & Seed in Petersburg, back in August to pick up a bunch of collard plants and found out that they would have 17-week old hens in September. So I had them put my name on the call list and began to plan and build the run first. Heretick has been a great resource for feed, straw, pine shaving, diatomaceous earth and many other items that you can use in your urban/suburban homesteading work.

I already had the chicken wire at the house, so I stopped by Home Depot and picked up a couple bundles of  2x2's, SPAX screws and went to work on an idea that I had been pondering for a good while now. Instead of building a single box and encasing it in chicken wire, I would build frames and then connect them to form a box. I didn't know how it would work structurally but I was soon gonna find out. So I got to building the frames, two of them 2ft x 8ft and then built six of them 2ft x 4ft. As you can see from the photo, the pieces fit well together and were much stronger, structurally, than I had imagined. I got the run completed just in time, as within a few days I got a call that the chickens were in and ready to be picked up.

The chickens were 17-week old Red Star hens, 3 of them. Being the first time ever handling or interacting with chickens, I have to give BackyardChickens.com a lot of credit! This site is a wealth of useful information and, by my experience so far, I have found it to be correct.

Knowing the chickens would need some shelter, I took the next weekend and started to build another plan for the coop portion that I had partially drawn up in Google Sketchup. I included it in one of my first posts on this blog about a year ago. I modified a few things, mostly using 2x2' in place of 2x4's and building on top of the existing run. Starting at midday on Saturday, I was able to complete it on Sunday evening. I say complete it, but only well enough to offer the chickens some decent shelter.

I have made some additions over the three weeks since and the chickens started laying about a week ago. We are now getting 2-3 large brown eggs a day. We let them out in the afternoons to run around the yard , pick through the garden and compost pile. They have been a blast and we are already amassing some great stories and good memories. We will keep you posted and show you the finished product in another post, but so far it has been a great experience!

If you have any questions feel free to comment and I will help out the best I can!!
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Location: Colonial Heights, VA, USA

Comments

  1. SPAX InternationalNovember 2, 2012 at 1:22 PM

    Hi Roger!

    Thanks for mentioning and using SPAX. We enjoyed reading your description of you constructing the chicken cage! We're sure, you're chicken must belong to the happiest ones on earth and the eggs that you eat to the best you could get… ;-) Keep us informed about your next projects, also on our Facebook page if you like (facebook.com/SPAX).

    Best wishes from Germany,
    your SPAX team

    ReplyDelete

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