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.

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.

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.

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.

The hens are getting their coop pimped out some more. Okay not really, but I say that to make them feel more special. We have needed to get the hens into another part of our property for a while now as they have completely and utterly stripped their lot of anything that moves or looks tasty. It’s pretty much a barren waste land. Lee has been working on skids for the coop so he can drag it behind his tractor to their new spot. It being winter in Oregon though has made his enthusiasm for crawling around in mud under the coop just a tad bit low. So our coop has mostly been sitting on jacks for the past week. Boy that sure goes with the Oregon love of all things blue tarp and trailer jacks. I am now hereby not admitting that my coop is on jacks.

So Lee did something, I just handed him the nails and whatnot. He will have to give the details to his grand chicken coop skid plan. It’s not all done yet but at least one of the skids is part way on.

Lee – Oh, it looks like I’m required to say something here. The photo above shows one of the two skids that are being fastened under the coop. The coop’s floor framing consists of 4×8 timbers arranged in a 6′ by 10′ rectangle. In the narrow dimension, 2×6 joists run on 2′ centers. (Yes, we know this is overkill — Next time I build a coop, it won’t even have a floor.) Anyway, the skids are 4×6 timbers, with angle cuts front and back to go over bumps easily and notches so they can rest on both the beams and the joists that support the floor. I’m then adding Simpson StrongTie fasteners to attach them permanently: two twist straps front and back, three angle brackets on the outside between the skid and the floor beam, and three hurricane clips on the inside between the skids and the floor joists underneath. All of this works out to over 2000 lbs of holding force per skid. I don’t want to end up in one of those youtube videos where somone tries to tow a shed and it pops off its skids.

We’ve been using a chicken feeder we made from scrap parts ever since the chickens were two months old. Lately it’s been driving Robin a little crazy. Our eleven laying hens eat about 100 lbs of feed a month, which translates into refilling their small and awkward feeder every 3 days. After 7 months, it was time to build something better.

Having reviewed various suggestions online, I was struck by the simplicity of the feed hopper design at the top right of chapter 5 of Handy Farm Devices. Make a box. Install a lip to serve the feed and an angled panel to hold the feed. Add a hinged panel to fill. Simple! Of course, nothing I embark on is quite that simple, but I liked the concept. My version is this:

As you can see, I made a number of improvements to the basic design. The lid is angled at 45° to prevent hens from standing on it. The bottom is angled at 15° to encourage the last of the feed to slide to the front. The front panel is two separate pieces arranged to increase the capacity. The sides are 2×6 material, and everything else is made from scrap 1/2″ panel material (either plywood painted on one side or OSB with the sealed surface facing the feed).

Everything was assembled with screws. Since the box is 27.5″ wide, I added a small block at the middle of the tray to hold the three bottom panels tightly together. (In the event that we switch back to serving mash feed.) As I was working on this feeder, I came upon a rather interesting idea. Instead of screwing it to the coop wall, I would attach an angled rail to the back which could hang from a matching angled rail installed in the coop. A small spacer block at the bottom of the feeder would keep things plumb against the wall. We could then build several feeders of varying widths, and mix and match them to the feed. Lots of free range food? Add a narrow 8″ feeder with free-choice oyster shell to boost their calcium intake. Home grown corn or grain? Install two 16″ hoppers, one with a commercial mix (so the chickens can balance their dietary intake) and one with the grain. Any future feeders I build to this design will use a single angled front panel to simplify construction.

We invaded the chicken coop at 11pm to take some measurements and return with a rail to be screwed into the wall. (Robin didn’t want to wait another day after it was finished.) With the feeder hung, we poured in a full 50 lb bag of feed and there was still room for another 30 lbs or so. So, not only will this new feeder reduce the frequency of refills by at least 7x, but refills are now simply a matter of cutting open a bag of feed and dumping the whole thing into the feeder. Much simpler!

Lee made an update to the chicken coop. After I put straw in the nesting boxes all the hens decided that it was a perfectly lovely place to lay their eggs. (Here I was thinking that it was going to be a pain to get them to stop laying on the floor of the coop and it wasn’t.) Except there wasn’t a lip on the nesting boxes so the straw kept getting scratched out. That made it so a few of the eggs ended up getting hairline cracks in them from popping out the hen butts onto the wood box.

Lee made a wood bracket, screwed it onto the wall, then slid a board into the first slot against the wall to make a 3 1/2″ lip. A second board was screwed onto the outside of the bracket to make a roost. The roost allows our fat-butted hens to still make it into their nesting boxes with the smaller opening.

We finished installing the woven wire in the new chicken pen, but first I have some pictures of the brace wires. This first picture shows the only instance where we installed two brace wires in an X pattern. One wire resists the pull of the fence and the other wire supports the weight of the gate. They were installed crossed in one direction and in line in the other to avoid the hot wire that will terminate at the gate post.

This is what it looks like from afar.

This second picture shows what most of the brace wires look like. They were also crossed (keeping them to the center of the brace) to avoid the hot wire as it turns the corner.

The starting and ending posts have brace wires that are not crossed. Since the hot wire terminates at these posts (at the center), this keeps the brace wires to the outside to avoid contact.

The entire chicken lot fence is now stretched and is waiting for the gate and hot wires to be installed.

And this lovely little instrument is a fence stretcher. Lee finally went and bought one after using our homemade one. It makes the whole fence stretching process so much easier. At least it does when you use it right. This picture actually shows us using it wrong as the wedges are supposed to be facing out instead of to the side. There wasn’t any instructions included in the box but when we contacted Premier they straighted it out for us. They have such awesome customer service! Tools work much better when used right.

On Saturday Lee finished putting in all the fence posts in the chicken pen area. I’m excited as we are getting that much closer to having the pen finished. The chickens are having fun chilling in the small temporary fence still. They are going to have a blast with more area to mill around in.