Wanted to share as a way to encourage others to take the leap. I told my wife no for years, eventually she came home with chicks and we had to get going. We have been at this a year and would never go back. At first it was overwhelming reading the posts here about how they need this and that, and thinking we couldn’t possibly provide it all, but we have some happy birds, we usually get 10 eggs a day, with 11 birds.

For example, stuff on the internet says they need x amount of sun. When we went through the permitting process they stated we could only allow them out 4 hours a day! That is crazy, but my point is being somewhere in the middle you can still provide a great life for your chickens. You just gotta do it and see what works for your situation and birds and keep improving along the way.

Ours sit in the forest in a custom built coop that we built mostly out of stuff we pulled from construction dumpsters. The power company has an easement past the forest, we so build a tunnel and a 8x16x4 box out of hardwire cloth. They loved it so much we ended up adding two more. Those were fairly cheap, the hardwire cloth was the expensive part but they have such a large area to run, we attached it with a long tunnel they run through, in case we need to take it apart for the power company.

It doesn’t have to be pretty, it can be however you like it. It really fits our life, we can feed them our dinner scraps, and get eggs and compost back. What a joy for everything to be multi use and waste so little. I grew up with farmer grandparents and took so many lessons, it’s great to give some of them back to my kids.

We also rotate different grassy areas to let them out when we are out in the garden.

Wanted to share my coop and success story(so far)