Our little chickens have grown quite a bit. They eat a lot of chicken food and they are starting to love eating greens like the dandelions below.


Watch them eat.

Grit

We didn't know that the chickens need grit along with food at first. They were with us for over a month with out any. We got grit from a small feed store near us. Nathan attached an empty tuna can to the tractor and we put the grit in there. Our chickens emptied it in two days. Two days later they emptied a second can. Cans three and four each only lasted one day. The picture below is can number five. We put it out this morning and it is already half gone. We are starting to think they are eating it for fun. We don't want to take the grit away because we don't know how much they actually need.

We have a plan. We attached this pie tin to a block of wood to make a feeder. (The block will hopefully keep it from being tipped over.) Today we filled it with the outside leaves of lettuce that we didn't want to eat. Our plan is to give them something other than the grit to focus on. Hope it works. We are about out of grit.

Goodnight

Every night at dusk (about 8:30 this time of year) the little chickens climb into the coop for bed.


The chickens all want to sleep on top of the nest boxes, which means I have to clean this space off every day. (This picture is just after cleaning.) I'm not sure if I should try to stop them from sleeping up here. They make quite a mess and there is plenty of room on the roosts. It's not hard to brush it off once a day but if I ever miss a few days I'm sure it will become intolerable.

When we first moved into our house, 2005, we loved it but we were not too excited about all the grass. Our problem with grass was all the water and fertilizer that it requires. It is true that the Portland area gets lots of rain but it all falls in the winter. We have three summer months with very little rain.



Summer of 2007 we started removing the grass.



We decided to make a big swoosh with gravel and a bit of a hill on the house side.



By the end of the summer, 2007, we had all the grass out and low water shrubs in.


Here it is spring 2008. One of the keys has been to water each plant well for it's first summer. Once they are established we have been able to just let them go.



Here it is today, summer 2009. We are very happy with it. We will always be doing little things but it is basically done. We have met our goal of low water and low fertilizer. Xeriscape has not meant less work for us. We still spend time every week weeding and trimming. That is fine though we enjoy working in the yard.

Using the Coop and Tractor

We moved the tractor over to the grass today at about 6:00 pm. We will move it back about 8:30 or 9:00 a little bit before it gets dark. They seem happy eating grass and clover.

Xeriscape

The front yard today. I'll write about this topic when I have time.

Building the coop

Our chicken coop has evolved over the last month.

Here is Nathan building the coop the the Saturday before we picked up the chickens. It was not quite done in time but close enough. Once we got them home there was still time to finish up the last little bit. They spent their first few days in here.


A few days later we finished the tractor. Here is the whole set up as it was about a month ago. The coop and tractor are separate pieces. At this time they had to stay together because one end of the tractor was open. One of the flat sides of the coop opens up like a cupboard for cleaning. There is also a door on the back side for gathering eggs. (We are supposed to have our first eggs around Halloween.)


Here we have finished the door for the tractor. It slides completely on and off. It is off here. We have also started covering half of the tractor to give the chickens shade.


A view from inside the tractor. Notice the chicken's door is at ground level. At this point that is fine but we want to do deep litter inside. A door this low will not work for that.


This picture is from July 3rd after some reworking and painting. Notice the door is about 10 inches up from the floor now. The chicken latter can come off and on.


Here's a picture with the cleaning doors open. Under the nest boxes is just storage.


Here is the whole set up in the back corner of our yard where we will probably keep the chickens most of the time. It is easy enough to move the tractor wherever we want. We can also move coop but that takes a little more work. We move the coop with a hand truck. The chickens love it when we move them on to a new patch of ground.