Diapers are just the beginning

Blue Andalusian, Easter Egger and friends - 3 weeks

Buff Chantecler - 3 weeks

Welsummer - 3 weeks

Delaware - 3 weeks

Golden Campine - 3 weeks

The gang - 3 weeks

I had forgotten how hard it is to get pictures when they are little and darting about everywhere. I was thinking that a nice piece of watermelon would keep them still and pretty much what I got was a bunch of pictures of chick butts.

From this:

Chicken Coop Round One

I went to this:

Chicken Coop plus the new addon

This is what I added on for the new chicks. The little house was made entirely out of scraps of plywood that we had left over from the original side of the coop. The roof on the new side was the old roofing material that had been on the old kid’s playhouse.

The new addon:

New coop addon

The old side is 8″x10″ and the new side is 8″x12″.

On the new side we had to dig down pretty far since the corner that is closest in this picture is lower than the rest of the area. The wire is buried all around and then I dug a trench and put cement blocks all the way around the coop. The back wall is on the hill and I used the blocks as a little retaining wall. In between the coop boards (painted white) on the bottom and the blocks I added treated lumber (ground contact) for a moisture resistent buffer. I liked the hanging automatic waterer (lil giant) so much that I added on this side also. On that waterer on the older side it had started to leak (the little valve that is in the stem).  The literature that comes with the waterer says not to use a regular tire valve because the valve in there is ‘special’. But I thought that they cost too much (I could not find them locally and would have had to buy online) and found a valve stem tool and new valves (4 of them) at our local hardware store for under $4.00. It has been working fine for months with that tire valve so I recommend giving that a try if you need to fix yours.