Chook space

Back in 2007, I read Linda Woodrow's The Permaculture Home Garden and got all enthused about getting chooks. I was super keen to get started, but felt that the dome style coop was a bit unattainable for us at that time (and I really wanted to use recycled materials from around our home as much as possible). So I designed a square coop 2m x 2m and just under 1m high. We had quite a large bamboo grove with thick bamboo growing in it. So we chopped them down, sawed them to length, and I went about lashing and cable tying them together. Simon then went through with and put cross bars at the corners with screws, bought some chicken wire, found some thick plastic wrap in the garage to wrap around the back half, attached some corrugated iron on for a roof over half of it, closed off a part for the roosting/nest area and it was good to go. Well, 4yrs later we still have the original coop and it's still going strong.

Initially, we moved it around the yard as a tractor and the chickens remained cooped and content on their fresh patches of greens munching and scratching away. My first year of gardening saw us with fantastic crops and healthy soil. I then started to find it tricky to maintain the crop rotation and successional planting though, so the chickens eventually got "parked" up on the side of the beds and just moved up and down the yard as required, but no longer directly placed over the garden beds (my growing times seemed to be quite a bit longer and I couldn't really get it to match up easily).

All the moving around meant that the coop did sustain a bit of wear and tear from our lumpy, uneven ground, and the bamboo stakes snapped in a few places. It was around this time that I decided to go with a fixed area for the coop (the chickens were basically free ranging all day by this stage), so we weren't getting contained "poop" to benefit from. So, after choosing our spot, and deciding to provide them with a better "house", we worked on attaching the kids unused plastic playhouse to the back. It was perfect in that it had a door to lead through to the original coop, several windows for gaining access to eggs and scooping out the poo, and could be fitted onto the back of the coop with minimal modification (with a perch fitted inside between the walls). Super easy and still works really well. The only issue we have when there has been torrential rain (once or twice a year), is that the area they are in is prone to surface flooding for a few days. This is something we may need to reassess if it continues to happen.

I went down to get some recent photos and discovered my camera battery was flat...