What is it about March and mud, anyway? It rains all winter long and there’s no problem, then March comes along and the ground turns to soppy, soupy mud wherever the turf isn’t super-thick. Why is that? I’m mystified.
It’s so bad this year that some of the hens actually have dirty feathers. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen this before. Normally they look sharp in all weather.
This, too, shall pass, as the weather warms up, the rain slackens, and the grass suddenly leaps into insane rates of growth. In a month I’ll probably be complaining that I can’t keep up with the mowing, even though I use a tractor.
Helpful hint: Wear an old pair of overalls over your other clothes when it’s muddy, even if your other clothes are another pair of overalls. That mud gets everywhere!
We’ve got two brooder houses in operation now, one with New Hampshire Reds we got from Oregon State University, and another with broilers from Privett Hatchery (actually, they were drop-shipped from Welp Hatchery, but I know that anything ordered via Privett is going to be good).
We get a deal on chicks from OSU every once in a while. These were straight-run New Hampshires. Normally I recommend that people avoid straight-run chicks, because most people have no desire to butcher their own chickens, and even less skill, and the last thing you want is a zillion roosters cluttering up the place. But Karen is a whiz at chicken butchering and we can always get rid of the excess it the Woodburn Small Animal Auction.
(Important tip: never buy poultry at an auction. They’ll come with free parasites that you’ll spend ages eradicating. Auctions are for selling, not buying.)
We’re right in the middle of false spring right now, with warmer temperatures, budding plants, and occasional blue skies. This always happens, and the weather always turns savage again (well, for Oregon) later. But it’s hard to resist buying baby chicks and seeds and trowels and stuff at this time of year.
We butcher broilers at approximately 8 weeks, give or take. The outdoor farmers’ markets start in mid-April, so we’re right on schedule. Hens are in full lay at about six months, so the chicks will start laying just as the older hens enter their summer slump. Half the time we botch basic planning exercises like this (too many calls on our time), but it looks like we got it right this year.
Though the weather is still uncertain across the country, it’s a good time to start baby chicks. A lot of hatcheries have specials up until the March baby-chick frenzy starts. If you don’t know what you want, my rule of thumb is to call the hatchery and ask which of their commercial-quality layers are the most docile and non-cannibalistic. That maximizes the egg-to-heartbreak ratio.
And don’t forget to take a look at my book, Success With Baby Chicks while you’re at it. Even if you’re a pro, it’s easy to forget the fine points between the last batch of last year’s chicks and the first batch of this year’s. You’ll get your money’s worth out of the book within 24 hours of the chicks’ arrival, I promise.
My chicken coops have always had metal roofs, and now I’m trying out metal siding, on the grounds that I want anything I build to last 20 years without maintenance, and the exterior plywood I’ve been using doesn’t deliver that.
[Update: Seven years after writing this blog post, the corrugated metal walls are holding up well. Seven years is long enough for plywood walls to start falling to pieces, but the metal walls are holding up well, with only a bit of rust here and there.]
One of my old pasture houses, with a 15-year-old metal roof and 7-year-old metal siding.
Does Metal Promote Condensation and Wetness?
People will tell you that metal siding sweats, because of condensation. This is true if the inside of the house is warmer than the outside, since moisture from the warm house will condense on the cold walls and ceiling. But it’s not about metal vs. wood, since condensation forms on any kind of roof or wall, no matter what it’s made of. In marginal cases, it’s more visible on metal because it’s 100% non-absorbent.
A Fresh-Air House is a Dry House
But you can dodge the problem with a fresh-air poultry house. If you add enough ventilation, the inside of the house is just as cold as the outside, and you get no condensation. My metal roofs don’t have condensation unless there’s snow on the roof and temperatures are above freezing. The rest of the time, my highly ventilated houses have dry ceilings and walls.
Fresh-Air Poultry Houses, by Prince T. Woods. Reprinted by me!
This is one of the main points of Fresh-Air Poultry Houses, the chicken-coop book I’ve republished (check out the sample chapter if you haven’t already). It focuses on the advantage of well-ventilated houses, a concept that still needs to be repeated constantly today. You won’t read anything about metal walls or roofs in this book, since it predates their use, but it’s a treasure trove in other ways.
You can also prevent condensation with insulation, but I don’t do that.
Can you really prevent damp chicken houses through ventilation alone? Well, it works for me, and I live in Oregon, which has a famously wet climate!
Installing Corrugated Sheet Metal Walls
Back to the construction project. In keeping with my other rule of construction (never use a saw when you can buy stuff that’s already the right size), I ignored my existing stock of 10-foot metal roofing and obtained some cheap 8-foot corrugated roofing from Home Depot. My chicken houses are 8×8 feet.
Karen and I banged these sheets onto a couple of sides of a chicken house where the old OSB siding was falling to pieces. We used roofing screws. These are hex drive screws with neoprene washers. We used to use roofing nails, but they pull loose too easily and we hate having roofing panels flapping loose in the breeze! And using power tools instead of a hammer keeps my shoulders and back from seizing up. I bang the screw in a short way with a hammer, then drive it home with a cordless drill.
I’m told that roofing screws have three times the holding power of nails.
These panels went on very quickly, and if they ever rust through (which they will, at the bottom edges anyway, if I allow chicken manure to pile up against them), I can take the screws out and replace them just as easily.
So far, so good. The shiny metal really brightens up the interior of the chicken house, and because it’s non-porous, it provides no place for roost mites to accumulate.
Cheap Roofing is Good Enough
Plain old “ripple metal” (corrugated steel) is less rigid than V-channel roofing, but it’s proven to be stiff enough, even for a house that gets dragged around behind a tractor, which can put all sorts of stresses on it, especially if it gets hung up on holes and bumps along the way. So far, so good. That means that, so far, the cheapest possible corrugated metal has been perfectly adequate.
Watch out for translucent corrugated fiberglass. In my experience, it’s not very strong and becomes increasingly brittle over time. I’m sure it has its uses, but don’t think of it as being structural in the way that plywood and corrugated steel are.
You Don’t Have to Settle for Ugly
Of course, you can build a much prettier house with metal roofing with baked-enamel finishes in designer colors, and you should probably do this if you don’t want a silver house, since it’s hard to get paint to stick to galvanized steel. While I’m always looking for the cheapest, longest-lasting, easiest-to-build designs, there are plenty of other ways of approaching the problem of chicken-coop design.
I like portable chicken houses. My henhouses are mostly simple little 8×8-foot houses that I move with a tractor. I don’t put litter on the floor. The chickens don’t spend much time on the floor anyway: they use the roosts.
I don’t shovel manure, either. When the manure starts getting to be a bit much, I don’t remove the manure from the houses, I remove the houses from the manure. I hook up a house to my tractor with a handy chain and drag it to a fresh patch of ground. Then I come back and use the rear scraper blade on my tractor to spread the manure over a long swath of grass. The grass soaks up the manure greedily.
We shuffled our houses around on Friday afternoon. Took about an hour.
For pastured broilers, we use lighter houses that are moved by hand, because the broilers are kept inside the houses at all times (broilers are so young and dumb that they don’t know to come in out of the rain, so we keep them under a roof at all times). Hens are older and smarter, so they come and go as they please. In fact, only one of my houses has a door! They get out of the way when the tractor arrives and when their houses start to move around.
The big trick with henhouses is that, if you move them too far, the hens get confused and sleep on the ground where the house used to be. So don’t move the houses too far. The first time you spring this on a group of chickens, ten or fifteen feet is plenty. Later you can move them as far as fifty feet or so.
The other trick is to move the houses as early in the day as you can manage, since that gives the chickens more time to get used to their changed landscape.
I’ve spent a good part of my life thinking about chicks — by which, for the moment at least, I mean “baby chickens.” It’s just about the new year, which means that hatchery catalogs will start arriving in the mailbox any day now.
One thing I’ve been doing over the last few years is popularizing the insulated electric lamp brooder developed by the Ohio Experiment Station in the Forties. I have their paper on it here, and I devote two chapters to it in my book, Success With Baby Chicks. It’s done us proud over the years and I routinely get fan mail about the design. Check it out. Your chicks will be warmer and you’ll use less electricity, and the whole shebang only takes a couple of hours to knock together.
Another trick I’m fond of is using the little quart-jar waterers, but with narrow-mouth glass canning jars instead of the horrible plastic jars the feed store wants to sell you. Glass jars glint like water, and you can watch the baby chicks wander over and peck at the glass a couple of times before finding the actual water. Also, the plastic jars are hard to clean, and they’re not clear enough to see when they’ve gone empty. Just buy the bases and leave the plastic jars alone.
I don’t like bigger waterers (gallon waterers, say), because they have too much water area and day old chicks get soaked, then chilled. The quart-jar waterers are tiny enough that this pretty much doesn’t happen.
If you’re wondering about what kind of breed to buy, try one of the brown-egg commercial hybrids if you haven’t already. Not only do they lay a lot more eggs, but they do this largely by laying in the off-season. If you’ve found yourself having to buy eggs at the store in the fall and winter, a handful of commercial layers should fix this. My personal favorite is the Red Sex-Link from Privett Hatchery in Portales, NM. They are just about as docile as Barred Rocks but lay a lot better.
