Building the Chalet au Poulet

Get ready folks, this is a long one!

Our chicks have been in the coop for two months now; the chicken yard is finished, the nesting boxes are in place, the eggs are coming, and I’m finally getting around to posting Kevin’s description of the construction. And here he is.

The chicken coop is sturdy and a little stylish for two main reasons. First, as a carpenter I like to have fun with whatever project I’m working on and I’d be embarrassed if fellow carpenter friends saw shoddy or simplistic work.

Second, a lot of the coops I've seen look like they were thrown together by a hog farmer in Appalachia smoking a corncob pipe in between pluckin’ a banjo and huntin' Opossum. No offense to all our hog raising, banjo playing, Opossum hunting friends out there, but you know what I mean.

The underlying philosophy: With almost any project I work on, especially those for myself, I try to use reclaimed lumber. Procuring and prepping reclaimed lumber can take a lot more time, but it’s well worth the effort and can still look very good while saving trees and money.

The design: I built the coop against the fence to save materials. I thought setting the posts at an angle would look cool and reduce mud splash at the bottom of the coop. I didn’t think the lower roof line would be a problem, but it is proving to have a disturbing fondness for the top of my head even when I duck as I approach the door. Because of that and the limited light that reaches the coop, I am thinking of replacing the plywood roof with clear corrugated roofing panels. (If I do, I’ll use the old roof for the new wood storage shed/compost cover.)

We have a lot of raccoons around here; at night I hear them skittering under our window, and folks definitely lose chickens to them. The wire mesh on the coop actually goes down about 10" into the ground and is bent at an outward angle, so even if a raccoon were to try to dig under the frame, it wouldn't make it inside. The cement slabs are there for extra protection against digging predators.



So, as with many things, but especially carpentry, one choice affects the whole process. For example, the "cool"-looking wall that leans out combined with the fence that is far from plumb made for some pretty odd angles. Even so, the framing of the coop wasn’t that hard, but when I chose to have the reclaimed fence boards meet in the middle of the door at roughly a 45-degree angle, that proved a bit trickier. Fortunately I had spent the previous four months doing the finish carpentry for a new eco home with curved walls and an arched ceiling, so my brain was already stretched out and primed for atypical thinking.



And finally, moving day!

We realized the chicks weren't going to get much direct sunlight, and since we had some space to the side of the coop, we added a fenced-in yard. You can also see the nesting box door open in the coop itself; it's hinged now and allows us to reach in to get the eggs from the outside. The lower door lets the chicks go in and out of the yard, and at night we can lock them inside (though it's just a hole in this shot).

The yard door allows us to clean out the yard easily. The mesh isn't as fine on the yard as the coop because the girls are only outside during the day.

We use the hole to reach in and latch the door. The chicks use it to get a gander at the yard.

Some visitor did try to dig under, so we put the bricks there.

Here's Big Mouth checking out the new doorway.

The girls love love love the dirt, especially surrounded by kale. The stump is there for interest. Really.


Here's the interior early on, when the chicks still had their little food and water trays. They sleep huddled up on the perch. Here you can also see the non-planed side of the wood; I like the rustic look.

And here's the interior finished, with the nesting boxes (a repurposed fruit box) and ladder,


the big hanging food dispenser,

and below Dinky in the nesting box, you can see the automatic water dispenser.

The long and short of it is I spent about four times as long building this as a rectangular coop would’ve taken, but as you can see it was worth it. By the way, check out how nicely the 30-year-old redwood fence boards look after being run through the thickness planer.

Here’s what we used:

RECLAIMED MATERIALS
Redwood fence boards
4x4 redwood posts
2x6 redwood joists
2x4 redwood studs
2x4 wire (outdoor run)
Plywood

PURCHASED
Rolled roofing
Roofing tar
Nails
Screws
Hardware cloth (1/4" wire)
Flashing
Door hardware
Simpson ties
Roofing felt

Here's the trench dug for the pipes to reach the coop. (We had to muscle the squash out of the way.)

And here, below the hinges on the door to the nesting box, is the spiggot with a forked hose bib; one permanently runs to the chicks' water and the other we can attach a hose to.

Here you can see the squash really making a run for the coop!

Altogether materials (not including the waterer) cost about $150. The labor, a lot more. The peace of mind knowing our chicks are safe and sound in their fancy, eco-poulet home? Priceless.

Full day's round up

Next time, I'll cull the aggressive hen faster.


This is the first time in a long time that the "babies" have been outside. Once "Ms. Peck Them 'Til They Cry" went to a new home where they pet her (!), the little ones decided that they could come outside. The other big hens do enough bossing around that they know there's a pecking order, but it's not sociopathic. Whew.


Eric and I built one more bed this morning. I have got to get them built because until they're all there, I keep acting like they're temporary, and haven't sown a cover crop or anything. Eeep. Just seven more to go. . . Good thing there's a heat wave this weekend; that seems to coincide with our most productive work efforts.

And next time, I'll rent the club's manual extractor again. Tried the electric; didn't like it.

I did pull some lovely capped honey from the hives, though.

And got some help from neighbors and Denise.


Sarafina says it looks as though we have someone trapped in there and are cooking them. Nope, just trying to figure out an unfamiliar piece of equipment.

Before I came to bed there were about four gallons of honey in the bucket, and another quart or so in the uncapping tank. I definitely don't have enough jars saved. Have to get on my friends and neighbors to save theirs for next year -- I plan to do this again!

And that dream I had about a backyard full of kale? If this True Siberian seed grows true, it could become a reality. If you'd like some seeds, email me. They weren't isolated physically, but if they're truly Siberian, they shouldn't have crossed with any other type of kale. We'll see.

Foraging and farming

If you came to visit my town now, one of the places I'd take you is my open secret -- the berry picking park. Some of the brambles are best up at the top, and those have a nice view of folks going round and round and round at the golf course. Sometimes I wonder if they're going to look over and wonder why there's a woman leaning way over the berry patch, but so far they haven't.
The other day a friend of mine came and we picked along the lower section where a ladder isn't quite a necessity.


Maybe the golf course is arranged so that fewer balls come over this side?


Tor has been a pretty good sport about coming along -- he picks some, eats some, flies his kite, and just hangs out.


Closer to home, Fred the cat got out after I pulled some of the honey frames off of the hives today. We had to leave for piano lessons before he could be caught, but he ended up in a comfy bed of catnip. He was also stoned enough to be easy to capture!


An attack of intelligence (or at least efficiency) prompted me to mix up an entire bucket of baking soda/soap water for battling my new official scourge, powdery mildew.


I'd already pulled the yellow crookneck that had succumbed, but not before it spread to the butternut squash. What really got me off my rear end and into active battle mode was finding it on the cantaloupe-type melons yesterday.


They look worlds better today and I have some hope for allowing at least some of the butternuts to get ripe.


Some are past saving, though.


I'm pulling leaves and trimming what I can as fast as I can. Thank goodness that being a gardener means there is always a new season coming. I dreamt of a back garden that was nothing but kale this morning. I guess that's one approach to crop rotation!

Someone's eating their veggies

I went out to pick the zucchini that I'd seen last night and found out that someone had beaten me to it.


Well, half of it, anyhow. I assume from the claw marks it was a squirrel.


Soon, however, I'm going to be eating my veggies. . . I think these tomatillos are ripe, even though they aren't bursting out of their wrappers. And that has got to be a Stupice, since it's not purple and the only other plants in this bed are Cherokee Purple. Yum.

Yo yo yo!

Apparently if I inhale enough dust and equine ammonia, it gets to me and my silly level. Eric and I got on a roll again this morning. Even with a puncture wound in his foot received from a random nail-studded board yesterday, he outworked me again. I tell you, there aren't many times I want to be a muscle-bound guy, but I wish I could do more heavy lifting.

I can't stress enough how wonderful it was to have so many helpful friends yesterday. My in-laws were impressed that people would just give up some time to help do dirty, uninspiring work. The bed building was actually fun, even though it entailed loads of stable sweepings, but before then it wasn't a basket of cherries. A quick look back. This is more of what it looked like -- but it was actually even worse.


This picture doesn't feature the pile of broken bricks (because the whole bricks in the pile pictured had been put into a patio arrangement) and all of the offcuts from the deck, undivided as to "painted" and "unpainted." Nor can you see the random garbage that seemed to accumulate, the torn-down old chicken coop, and the piles of cement footings dug out from the old deck. That was fun for people to move, you betcha.

No one grouched, everyone kept saying, "What else can I do?" and it almost made me cry. So I got to say, "Sort the painted wood from the unpainted, and we'll burn the unpainted later, when we get a firepit. Carry the bricks out. Let's drag those branches out front," and things like that. It just got done, and we got to hire a very local guy to do the dump runs, and it felt good to have good paid people to help, too. And I forgot to hand out jam jars as thank yous. . .

So, this morning we were still very aware that there was a smelly pile in our driveway, so Eric and I gave the shovels, wheelbarrow, and mattock another work out.


Four down, only eight to go. And two of those are going to be shortened, because of the apricot and apple trees on the side and back. Each bed has a layer of horse poop and associated stuff, some blood and bone meals, a layer of backyard "dirt" (I think it gives soil a bad name), a layer of purchased enriched compost, with lime, gypsum, kelp, and some other stuff, repeated twice. We overfilled just a little because there's going to be settling. Kevin came by today and we discussed how it's going to be the work of years to get this soil built, and it is. I'm going to have to get really serious about composting.

And watering! After we get these all built (there's still at least one bed's worth of stable out front), I'm going to put on my irrigator's thinking cap and figure out a low-flow gravity method. My neighbor is very sweet about letting me use his well water, and I do when I need it, but I'd like not to impose when I can do without. And the kids are still taking baths, thank goodness!

So, when I get it all worked out, maybe a memorial tattoo would be in order. What do you think of this one? We could all be Gangsta Gardeners:


You all could be down with that, right?

Many hands make light work

Stefani's yard is getting a serious overhaul---cleaning up, clearing out, pruning, making way for 12 (yep, 12!) huge new beds o' food. Friends joined us yesterday for some heavy lifting.

It's too bad we missed photographing the earlier part of the day, when Esperanza was working like a wild woman. It may not seem as though we accomplished a lot---2 out of 12 beds---but the three loads of haulage taken away, the fact that the yard is clean save for mounds of dirt, and the good time spent with folks just working to be helpful was great.

You don't often have the chance to say "That's a load of horseshit" and mean it literally:

Yes, that's a woman with a tiny baby helping, too:


Here's the evolution of the two beds we built yesterday. From that ladder in the back Kevin trimmed some huge, sun-blocking branches.



And in the end, we had this:


Two down, ten to go.