Since the chickens started living in their coop back in May 2009, we have never cleaned it out. Now, this wasn’t because we were lazy, but because Lee wanted to try out the deep litter approach. I must admit that I had some reservations about it. I was afraid that is was going to stink and be really gross, but that was never the case. The chicken coop rarely smelled. Whenever it did get a little bit smelly, I would just add a new layer of wood shavings on the top of the litter layer and fluff everything up. Fluffing is accomplished either with a pitchfork or by throwing a few handfuls of crack corn across the floor and letting the chickens go nuts. That would take care of any smell instantly.

Besides the time savings, deep litter is reported to help control coccidiosis, reduces aggression, and supports chicken health by producing vitamin B12. Deep litter is best used in conjunction with open-air housing so excess ammonia is ventilated. The concept is very similar to operating a compost pile. You can find a complete guide to the whys and wherefores here. We didn’t use any lime in our management of the litter, because although it would help the texture it must be manually mixed to avoid hurting the chicken’s feet.

Since the girls got moved out to the garden I decided that I was going to clean out the coop so I could use their litter to make compost for the garden later. It was also getting quite built up in the coop which made it difficult to close the door.

I left a little bit of the old litter in the coop so all the microbes would start the new batch of litter cooking.

Then I added a whole bag of new pine wood shavings to the floor.

During the past 9 months of using the deep litter approach I probably should have lofted the litter more regularly then what I did, but it still seemed to work out fine. Another problem that we had in the coop was that the litter would get a little too wet from our waterer. We have a hanging waterer that, once it gets low, tilts and spills water onto the shavings below it. Sometime soon we are going to try to solve this problem.

Lee hung the garden gate today. It looks pretty nice I think. This is a big improvement over the cattle panel tied to the post which always tried to snag your clothes.

After the chicken coop move had been completed I took a peek inside to look at my girls. The first thing I see is this big blood smear on the chicken feeder and my eyes about pop out of my head.

So I go into the coop to find out what happened and expecting to see someone with a very bloody head. All I could find was a Bob that looked like it had a peck to the comb. A lot of the Rhode Island Reds and the Barred Rocks has what looked like small peck scabs on their combs. I’m thinking that they REALLY are not happy with the recent confinement in the coop. Today would have been their fifth day in the coop. I can understand why big chicken places clip the beaks of their chickens if only five days brings out this sort of pecking. The only other thing that I can guess with what happened was maybe the chicken got hurt somehow in the latest move.

Since so many of them seemed to have little pecks to their combs, due to what must be boredom, there was no way I could separate that many. Saturday they will be let out to forage finally and that will hopefully solve that. Today to help with the problem I put new bedding in, fluffed up their deep litter to make scratching easy, and sprinkled in about a quart of cracked corn on the floor to keep them busy. I will keep a close eye on them for the next week to make sure the problem doesn’t get worse.

We were so close yesterday to finishing the big chicken coop move before some unfortunate events took place. Today we had a bright idea, courtesy of my Dad, on how to finish up the last little bit of the move.

It involves using wooden posts as rollers under the coop. Lee is much more cheery looking today don’t you think? Must be the ‘third times a charm’ outlook on life.

The coop was farm jacked up on both sides and the first round wooden post was placed under the coop.

The new bolt was attached.

The farm jacks were removed and the coop sat down on the round post.

A discussion ensued over the rough sound of Lee’s tractor. It was probably on whether the tractor was going to make it without dieing again. Lee – Tractor problems have been traced to faulty distributor wires. I’m going to replace them, and the leaking fuel shut-off, and hopefully it will go back to purring like it did last year. Robin – Wow, only men ever talk about an engine purring. Anyways …

WOOHOO it seems to be working!

New posts are added as needed to keep the roller effect going on.

Half way through the coop had to be jacked up again to get another post under it.

We only used three fence posts for the whole process.

Once we had the coop where we wanted it the concrete blocks were put under it again. It managed to rain the whole time we were out working with the coop.

I can’t believe that we actually got this thing moved considering how many problems seemed to come up along the way.

I don’t seem to take pictures of our cats very much. Lee and I were out working on the front porch and the cats were keeping an eye on us. Since I had my camera handy I figured I would keep an eye on them instead.

Jack had been forcibly ejected from our bed a little bit earlier. So she is still feeling thoughts of hopefulness in these pictures about her chances of reentry of the house for some more snoozing. You can really notice her bum eye in these pictures. Her butt is growing to amazing proportions due to her biscuit addiction and her strict exercise routine of sleeping on our bed. It has been about six months now since she was abandoned on our property.

Jasper is feeling quite grumpy because Jack decided to pester him. Jasper will be 16 years old this year. We adopted him when he was 10 years old. Lee felt sorry for Jasper because he didn’t think anyone would adopt an old cat. Jasper has never forgotten that. In turn Jasper has an intense deep love that follows Lee around, much to Lee’s dismay when he is trying to accomplish something.

Prepare yourselves for another exciting adventure in watching us move the chicken coop. This is part two.

We are off…

We are stuck…

We are off again…

Oops, we got stuck again…

We are off again, I think…

Nope, we got stuck again…

Yeah, we are off…

Nope, it didn’t work. We are still stuck…

YES! We made it and we are off once more…

The chicken coop is making tracks to it’s summer vacation home.

Aw man, we got stuck again…

The bolt sheered and the coop is stuck. Guess we will have to call it a day.

Look at that frustrated face.

We are obviously going to have to work something different out when we get ready to drag the coop back to the chicken pen in the fall. The ground is uneven and the skids aren’t wide enough or tall enough we think. So it keeps getting stuck and is a real pain in the butt to move. Thankfully Lee didn’t get killed by the sheering bolt and flying chain. Thirty pounds of metal in the back of the head probably wouldn’t have ended well. I keep telling him how happy I am that he didn’t die today.

My Dad came by and gave us some ideas on how to get it moved the rest of the way into the garden. Hopefully tomorrow or Saturday we can finish up the job. The chickens are very angry about their confinement in the coop the last four days. Once we get them all the way into the garden they will need to spend another 24 to 48 hours in the coop before we release them into their new fenced in area. The chickens staring out the window will acquaint them with the new surroundings and make them not want to go back to their old chicken lot.

I did a late night chicken snatching from the coop. Elwood has a very poopy butt that I wanted to take a closer look at. She won’t let me near her in daylight hence the late night snatching. I kept hoping that the poop would just fall off. Unfortunately, it never did and seemed to be getting a little worse. Sometimes the other chickens will get a little bit of a poopy butt but then it seems to go away. I always attributed that to food related items. Like when they got lots of pumpkins and squash to eat all at once.

I washed off most of Elwood’s clumpy poop problems with warm water and then trimmed the feathers in that area with scissors. I did some looking around online and found that poopy butt problems can be either caused by lice, mites, or your chicken can just be prone to a poop butt.

I found a link that shows a chicken with lice (scroll down the link for the disturbing chicken butt pictures) but I didn’t think that Elwoods problem looked quite like that. Another picture of lice and mites that I found didn’t remind me of Elwood’s problem either. The chicken in first link has the lice clumps right tight to her butt feathers. After working on getting the poop clumps out with water the smaller ones that were left on Elwood were not tight to the base of her feathers.

So, do I have a lice problem or not I’m pondering. I guess that I will keep an eye on Elwood and all the other chickens. I’m hopeful that Elwood is maybe just predisposed to getting a clumpy butt and doesn’t have lice. Make that really, REALLY hopeful.

I took a picture of her in the egg laying box earlier today. She even let me pet her. Probably because she was so freaked out wondering why the nesting box got so bright.

The last two weeks Lee has been puttering on and off trying to get the chicken coop ready to move. Saturday came and it got too dark by the time Lee had completed installing the last skid. We got ready to pull the coop out to the garden on Sunday but then his tractor wouldn’t start. So off we went to get a battery charger. Monday came and as soon as Lee was off work we are out there again. He got his tractor started and backed up to the coop…

…and attached his chains. YES! We are finally on our way. It’s going to be green pastures for the hens soon. More luscious grass, bugs, and weeds than they will know what to do with. I’m feeling nervous that something horrid is going to happen to the coop along the way. Lee was feeling excited about dragging something around with his tractor. And then………his tractor died. It died right there. DOH!

Before we can move our chickens into the garden, we need a proper garden gate for the 4′ north entrance. Thus far, our temporary gates have been lengths of cattle panels wire tied together and either tied (south gate) or propped (north gate) against the fence posts. This keeps out the deer, but any chicken-hungry dog could push past the north gate.

I priced pre-made chain link gates, but thought I could build something prettier for less money. The basic plan is to build a rectangular frame out of cedar and add a diagonal cross brace. After accounting for hinges and latches, the gate needed to be 43″ wide by 6′6″ high.

I decided to build the gate using all mortise and tenon joinery. This is arguably overkill for a garden gate, but has three advantages:

• Strength – Few joints are stronger than a glued mortise and tenon
• Appearance – By cutting through-mortises and leaving the tenons slightly long the joinery is emphasized for appearance
• Practice – I hope to build a number of different pieces of furniture and fixtures in our house, so I need every opportunity to practice woodworking techniques without the stress of expensive woods and critical eyes

This shows the basic joint used at all four corners of the gate. I cut the tenon (narrowed rectangular end) on the table saw using both a tenoning jig and some nipping away with a stop block. The mortise (rectangular hole) was cut with a router. I’ve owned a router for 3 years, and I’m sad to say this is the first time I’ve actually used it. Wow, lots of fun! This was much easier than the drill and chisel technique I used on the corbels. (Some chiseling is still required to square up the corners and smooth out alignment issues.)

Here’s a close-up of the same joint after assembly. The cross brace also used mortise and tenon joints, but I used blind mortises (nothing pokes through).

The gate frame is of wood, but I decided to use cattle panels to fill the openings. I dry fit the whole gate on the floor, and then laid a piece of cattle panel onto the top and bottom spaces. The position of each panel wire was marked on the wood, and the wire was marked 1″ past the beginning of the frame. Then I drilled holes in the frame where each wire would align, and cut the wires so they would extend into each hole.

The effect is that the wire panels appear to grow out of the gate frame. This required a very fixed assembly order, and I made the mistake of drilling holes for some of the wires in the diagonal in two directions, causing much straining and bending to get them to fit. The picture on the left shows the metal panels inserted into the diagonal and the top and bottom rails. We are about to align and glue the vertical stiles to complete the gate.

Robin and I were both really happy with how the gate turned out, and we started talking about how to finish it. It’s made of cedar, a nice dimensionally stable wood, but sun and rain will make their mark and without a finish it will turn grey and brittle over the years. I did a bunch of research on outdoor finishes, and narrowed our choices down to two: a good latex exterior paint (10 years between scraping, sanding, and re-painting), or a penetrating oil stain (1 to 2 years between coats). We both decided to opt for vain-but-beautiful and chose the penetrating oil. The yearly maintenance is pretty low-effort, and we didn’t want to cover up that wood grain. This is also a test case for an eventual cedar fence Robin would like to build around her garden.

We chose Superdeck transparent stain, mainly because it was the best product we could find in a quart size. It uses a Linseed oil base, but that’s pretty much the only natural thing about it. If we didn’t need the gate up so soon, I would have ordered a quart of Penofin Verde which uses all natural oils and vegetable resins and is VOC and petroleum free. Sign me up!

Penetrating oils are easy to apply. You just brush on the stain, give it time to dry, and then wipe off the excess with a rag. The gate is now resting by the front door, ready to be hung on the fence tomorrow.

Our English Shepherd Aggie doesn’t have any sheep to herd, so she makes up for it by using Edgar as her own personal practice toy.

Here she starts out all innocent and full of love.

Then she acquires her target…

She starts to suggest that her target get a move on…

…or there will be repercussions.

The target’s ears shoot up in horror as he tries to declare he is not a sheep.

The target then tries to stampede…

…with little success.

Then the sweet little face comes back. The sheep have been put in their proper place.