| 1. Yes, they REALLY DO eat your crops. Dammit. I've been keeping them in their coop ever since I noticed they ate some of the sugarsnap pea plants. They can eat those vines eventually, JUST NOT NOW. At some point, we'll need to put chicken-proof fencing around our beds.
2. They poop everywhere. I got chickens so they would poop out fertilizer for my garden. But I didn't need any fertilizer for the brick path in the garden, and plenty of the poop has landed there.
3. It only took them a few days to "get it" that I'm the food lady. Even when they are out foraging in the yard, they approach me when I walk up. When I stick my hands in their coop, whether to adjust their water container, to feed them, or to pick them up, they try to see what edible thing must be in my hand for them to eat.
4. Our coop is NOT safe from predators. I did my homework ahead of time and found out that opossums don't really dig. Phew. What I didn't realize was that if a predator can't fit through the wire fencing we used on the coop, some predators would happily reach into the coop to kill the chicken and then pull the chicken out piece by piece to eat it. So far, so good, but we need a better coop.
Thus far, I've mostly had fun learning which foods the chickens like. Of course, they like most foods, but they like some better than others. They'll eat orange rinds and egg shells but they LOVE leftover oatmeal, bread, potato latkes, and bananas. I like watching them fight over things as I put them in the coop. Any time I take a bunch of kitchen scraps out to the coop, it's fun to watch and see which food is the most popular.
I bought the girls the same type of food and water containers I've seen in other backyard coops, but every single time I visit the coop, the water container is completely filled with bedding and chicken poop or dirt (I can't tell). I'm sure they kick that stuff in their while they search for bugs each day. Hopefully I clean it out enough times every day that the chickens get enough to drink... but I wish we didn't have this problem. To a lesser extent, it happens with the food container too.
The cats and, to a lesser extent, the dog have calmed down about the new additions to our family. The cats seem to have little interest in hunting for chicken, and only one of my three cats knows how to kill anything larger than a bug anyway (I've seen her get a baby snake). The dog doesn't want to eat the chickens, he just wants to sniff them. He does the same thing to my cats.
A friend who reads my Facebook page saw the picture of my pathetic homemade coop and offered to help me build a better one. She told me to get a plan online and then get the materials. She's got all of the tools and (I hope) knows how to use them. I've now got a plan, and my friend tells me that a store nearby will cut the wood to the plan's specifications if I buy it there. I am so inept with tools that I barely know the difference between a wrench and a screwdriver, so hopefully my friend knows what she's doing and a week from now my birds will be living in a nicer, safer coop.
The plan is likely going to cost more than I'd like to spend. In fact, if the materials really cost $300 (as the plan says they will... I didn't get to see that detail until AFTER I bought the plan), I think I could probably get a ready-made coop at the nearby organic nursery for about the same price. I'm still going to print out the plan and take it to the store, but once I get there, I'm going to see if I can communicate a much simpler idea to whoever is helping me, and then work from there. My chickens don't need to live in Cluckingham Palace, they just need to be safe and comfortable. |
