The good Gallus gallus coop design is the one that fits into your homestead and lifestyle
What is the good poulet chicken coop design ?
That doubt is really a can of worms .
As I share in yesterday ’s Emily Price Post on Gallus gallus , right housing for our chickens was an on-going job . Every metre we thought we had the perfect organization , something would happen that would change our idea .
Our traditional chicken hencoop with a run needed to be closed at nighttime or raccoons would get over the fencing and kill our birds – and the chicken tractor so loved by permaculture enthusiast and earthy backyard chick whisperers had a disastrous fault : predators could stab beneath them and behead our shuttle .
The hunting for the better chicken coop design has been an on-going one .
The best chicken coop design is the one that fits into your homestead and lifestyle
Chicken Coop Design Considerations
My ideal chicken henhouse design would contain the follow feature film :
That ’s a marvellous guild .
In Florida where raccoons , opossums , prairie wolf and dogs are everywhere , keeping your chickens safe from predators is elusive . Even if you handle to keep the shuttlecock from roving four - legged brigand with a good fence , sometimes they ’ll be attacked from above by hawks .
I can not seem to create a crybaby tractor that deals with these issues properly , so as much as I have sex the idea of keeping hiss in a transferable coop I can move from spot to tell apart in my garden and food for thought forest , chicken tractors that permit the Gallus gallus access to the soil ( i. e. no wire on the bottom of the tractor ) also allow predatory animal to tunnel up underneath their wall in the night and scourge your Rhode Island Reds .
I recently visited my friend Larry and film his unequaled chicken tractor he has n’t had much trouble with piranha and this design , though having a dog might be a help there :
Every year he bring up enough meat birds for his family unit , plus a new round of ball - laying hens . These new tractor are pretty impressive and address with the summer warmth a lot better than some of the other ones I ’ve seen .
For a fluid chicken coop innovation , Larry has a good thing locomote …
… but here ’s another alternative .
Last year my friend Allan shared a completely different approach to chicken housing . He built a really great chicken coop out of pallets and secern me how he did it in this video :
This second chicken chicken coop pattern is basically a fortress . It ’s pass over on all side , making it predator proof – but it does n’t cover decimal point 3 and 4 :
stage four could be mitigated by cutting and befuddle sess and weeds to your poulet ; however , that ’s another step of labor .
So What’s The Answer?
Quite a while ago I imagined a rotating wimp tractor design ( which I also embrace in my bookCompost Everything : The Good Guide to Extreme Composting , along with how chickens can be used to recycle lots of “ waste material ” back into stain ) that would rent me employ chickens to manure , till and weed my garden beds via a hencoop that precisely fit over each bed :
If the borderline of the garden beds went deep enough into the soil that predator were ineffective to dig out beneath them , then I conceive this would be a reasonably darn secure agency to touch all the points I ’d like included in the perfect chicken coop design . I made a misunderstanding in the graphic , however – the portion of the hencoop with a bottom on it should be 4 x 4′ , with an 8′ run that goes over the garden bed , afford you infinite for plenty of birds . Alternately , the entire plan should miss a storey and just be 4′ x 8′.
The volaille coop should also be locked down to the garden bed systema skeletale to keep it predator - complimentary .
Potential problems:
1 : A rotate bed design like this would only work year - round of drinks in mild climates
2 : Keeping the chickens on fresh grass / weeds / spent garden crops would require more beds than pictured
3 : Only a little amount of chickens could be kept .
More tweaking and thinking is patently require .
Other Possible Chicken Coop Designs
A design my married woman would care to implement as a succeeding chicken coop design is theVictory Garden Chicken Systemmentioned by Geoff Lawton in hisUrban Permaculture film .
As you could see in the illustration found at the first linkup above , it ’s a dual paddock arrangement that lets the razz run through one field , then through a second after they ’ve burned that area out .
It would be easy enough to project this as a four - paddock system of rules , too .
I advocate burying part of the fence and building them to at least 6′ to keep out the defective guys in the dark , then you could likely get away with leaving the cage candid overnight .
If you ca n’t , you might borrow from Allan Sanders ’ coop design in the video and just fence over the entire top of the garden paddock . That would really be an expensive hurting , but for field with bad predator trouble it might be required .
My friend Justin Rhodes , creator of the excellentPermaculture Chickensfilm ( You HAVE to go see his detached videos here – do not happen GO , justgo see them ) , has his own unequaled approach path to lodging poulet he calls the “ Chicksaw ” :
Very clever . Though it still requires the birds to be shut in at night , it solve the burrowing predator problem and allows your fold to be be active to wherever you need some little horticulture assistant .
Ultimately , the pick of housing is up to you . If you ’re only maintain a few birds or if you really like keeping a schedule , a small coop you open and close morn and even would crop . If you ’re like me , and you sometimes visit a friend for a few moment then end up smoking cigars or going on a unwritten hike through the woods in search of wild yam … well , you might need a fortress - manner volaille coop .
protect these beast is your elementary job once you ’ve taken them on – and everything in the world likes to eat volaille .
Speaking of eat on Gallus gallus , tomorrow I ’ll be back with a look at stock and my experiences with both meat and laying breed for the backyard chicken flock .
