Chicken Hoop House, Part One

Today we started work on the chicken hoop house for the meat birds who are starting to escape their garage quarters.. not to mention stinking the place up!  I wanted something movable, but chicken tractors weren't quite was I was looking for.  So I found a plan online for a chicken hoop house and gave it to my hubby and told him that was what I would like.  He took the plans, made some adjustments and away we went!

Materials list is as follows:

(2) 8' x 50" cattle panels

(4) 10' pressure treated 2 x 4s

(1) roll chicken wire (ours is 4' x 50', we can always use the extra!)

(2) 8' regular 2 x 4s

(1) package plumber's strapping

(1) 16 x 10 canvas tarp for over the top

(1) 8 x 10 silver tarp for the back

Misc. scraps of wood, or additional regular 2 x 4s

Staples, screws, nails, wire, zip ties, etc.

The hoop house will be covered with a tarp over the top and the back, leaving the front open.  For summer we will also leave a gap at the top of the back part for cross ventilation.  Each day the hoop will be moved to a new section of pasture in our vegetable field.  That keeps the grass and the chickens happy!

First DH and oldest DS notched out the pressure treated 2 x 4s, each one about a foot in from the edge.  They should NOT be flush when you are done.  Also cut the front and back of the side pieces at a 45 degree angle, these will be your skids, and you will attach rope or chain to them for moving the hoop house.  Many plans said to leave a bigger gap on the front and back piece, this is to make moving it easier and also so if you run over a chick when you're moving the house it can roll out the back.  We're more concerned with predators, so ours is lower down.  We'll just move it more slowly.

Our plans said to add brace pieces over the top of each corner, but if we followed the plans, the bracing would have been awful since the pieces are not flush.

 So instead DH notched out the front and back pieces to fit the brace piece.  Beautifully done!

 Bottom frame complete.

Now it's time to add one of the panels.  We first secured the panel with tie downs to keep their shape to make attaching easier.  We attached the hoops to the outside of the skids using fencing staples. 

 Second panel in place.

We secured the two panels to each other with some wire.  Notice the placement of the wire, this will prevent the wire from ripping at the tarp.

The back framing goes up.  This is done by making an upside down V and attaching that to the panel with plumber's strapping.  The 2 x 4 is also attached to the back of the bottom frame. Notice that we put the chicken wire on first before we added the back brace sections.  This makes it easier to pull the chicken wire taut.

 Framing for the door.  We made ours about 2' wide.  Again attached to the panel with plumber's strapping and screwed to the bottom of the frame.  After the door was on we added additional support between the door frame and the edge of the panel.

 Kids working on the chicken wire for the front section.  Our kids are an awesome help to us.

DH notching out the wood sections for the door.   I love those hands.

Almost complete!  We ran out of time and we don't yet have hinges or a lock.  Awesome work guys!  The chicks are going to love their new quarters :)  We retired for the night for a nice Resurrection Sunday dinner - roast lamb and potatoes, yum!

Of ducks and poop...

On Good Friday morning we decided to do a major cleaning of the mudroom.  With the ducks and kittens living in there it was getting a little hectic.  When everything was all nice and clean smelling and neatly re-packed I decided I didn't want the ducks back in there.  They are getting so big and they are MESSY and STINKY, even though they spend the majority of the day outdoors.

So when DH got home from work we went to work on building a temporary duck house in the dog run attached to the chicken coop.  We used hay bales, a section of a cattle panel for the roof support and a tarp.  It actually makes a pretty nice little shelter!

Ducks in the run

Duck shelter

Time for bed!

Nice and cozy :)

It's actually surprising warm in there.  Nice and protected and as long as we keep their water OUT of their shelter area it should stay relatively dry.

Once we have our big chicken coop built, the current chicken coop will become the duck house.  That's not too far off now, so this will do nicely until then.

Oh.. and the ducks are starting to QUACK!  Love it!

Around the farm

Today we managed to get the electric wiring done in Pasture 2 so we could move the pigs into that pasture. It took us all day, first moving the shed, then finishing the barbed wire fencing in one area and then putting in the electric. But it's done! I am so glad DH built the pig shed on skids so we could move it from area to area. The Farmall got put to work today!

All we haven't done yet is put a pig water nipple on the waterer on that side, so we left the small gate between the two pastures open and will add the water nipple tomorrow.


This is the double sided waterer we were lucky enough to inherit with the house and land. If you look closely, you can see my wonderful DH has added a pig water nipple on the front and connected it to the waterworks. SO wonderful not to have to carry buckets of water around! The pigs love it too. We installed the green gate on the left last weekend, that is our human gate between the two pastures, we don't have the livestock gate in yet, so the animals use this too. Butterbelle was a bit hesitant, but has since adapted to it quite nicely. DH is going to add another water nipple on the other side of this waterer so the pigs will have water available in both pastures.

Exploring the wonderful green grass. I am pretty excited that our rotational grazing plan is coming along nicely. We still need to divide the third area in two and then we'll have four pastures total, with a possible fifth in our vegetable area.

Our little Daredevil. He has caused a bit of havoc on the farm in the last week! He was climbing on the haybales and knocked one onto the chicks container after I moved them into the garage. They haybale broke the container so I had to figure something else out for them. What we have now is actually better, I'll share a photo of that later. He also rode into one of our newly planted fruit trees today, luckily no damage, but he was grounded from the ATV for the rest of the afternoon.

The tree in question, as you can see it's just fine. Look at those buds! Other things are doing great on the farm as well....

The garlic.

The spinach, broccoli and cauliflower bed. They are doing wonderfully well. We had some really strong winds here the last few days, and a lot of the greenery you see is those "helicopter" seeds blown down from one of our trees.

The gooseberry bush we got from Henry Fields. I cut it down to half its height after we planted it. We've never had gooseberries before.. so we really hope they're good!

Grapes coming along nicely.

DH gave lessons to our oldest DD and oldest DS on how to drive the tractor. They both did great!




The chickens haven't quite been pulling their weight. We have 13 laying hens and only get about 8 eggs a day. They've definitely slowed in production, so we're looking at adding oyster shell to their feed again.

Today was a very busy, but productive and satisfying day!

Tomato seeds have arrived

Today we finally received our tomato seed order from Seven Acre Seeds. I placed the order towards the end of March and they shipped in a timely manner, and I waited.. and waited... Finally after about 10 days from the shipment date I wrote and asked if I should be concerned that my order hadn't arrived yet. They very quickly shipped out a new order, which arrived today! I should add that we currently have temporary mail carriers and the mail delivery has been.. interesting. I am left wondering who got the original order of tomato seeds.

Unfortunately I had decided that it was getting too late, so last week I started tomato seedlings with seeds I already had on hand, so these will probably have to wait 'til next year. I specifically ordered crack free/resistant tomato varieties since so many of our tomatoes cracked last year. Some of the varieties I already had on hand we never planted last year, and they're said to be crack resistant, so I think we'll be okay. We planted out 105 tomato seedlings. According to MO's extension site that should be enough for our family for eating fresh and processing.


Tomatoes should be planted out about May 10th in our area so I'm off to a bit of a late start this year.

Kudos to Seven Acre Seeds for their excellent customer service, as well as for the free seed packet (Golden Egg) which was included in the order :)

Today is a really gloomy day, the ducklings are outside and loving it though! Tomorrow we hope to get Pasture 2 electric fenced so we can get the pigs in there and out of Pasture 1. We will have to move their shed, but that's relatively easy. Right now they have taken over Butterbelle's shed and we need to have that available to her when she calves at the end of May. We still need to get the milk stanchion made and get her used to it before she calves.. so much to do!!!

I also got another package today.. watch our Etsy store for new arrivals happening soon!

Pastured Pigs

We've been working for a while now to get our pigs out of their small enclosure and into the big pasture. We had to run electric fence first though to keep them in. We finally got it done and released the pigs. Can you say PIG HEAVEN? They were running all over the place and squealing for joy. It was very funny :)

Butterbelle is not quite sure what to make of them yet, but seems to be tolerating them. Our plan is to have a rotation system going after dividing our pasture into appropriate sections. Butterbelle will have the pasture first, and then when she moves onto the next one, the pigs will move onto the one she has just left. We'll have four or five areas in the rotation and we expect this to do wonderful things for our pasture.

A busy week!

We've had a busy last couple of days. We got the part for the tractor that needed welded, so Dan could get out there and bush hog. Of course everybody had to have a turn sitting on dad's lap :)







Our pasture looks so much nicer now and we can actually find Butterbelle when we go look for her.

We also got the electric fence fixed, so now the piggies can't root near the fence anymore. They're not very happy with us though and spent yesterday sulking and stayed in their shed all day. They're a little happier today. They have tamed up enough that when we feed them they will allow us to scratch them if we move slowly.

The one has been named "Little Miss Personality" or "Little Miss" for short. She sure HAS a whole bunch of personality and is always running around acting goofy. The other piglet is more reserved. We'll probably eat her. LOL. As Dan says: "No slackers allowed." I guess she's slacking in the personality department. Kidding aside though, we're keeping one pig for breeding and one for butchering, so we'll keep the friendlier pig which at this point is Little Miss. Next month we will be picking up our Mulefoot Boar and we'll breed an Ossabaw / Mulefoot cross for butchering.

Also, in other news, Dan finally bought a tractor! It is a 1941 Farmall H. He bought it at an online auction and will go pick it up on Saturday. It will need a new battery and some TLC, but it's only ever had one owner and has been stored in the barn. We're quite excited.


Our new (to us) tractor


Plus a very dusty Bradley sickle mower

Glad to finally have a tractor, it sure has been prayed for!

Baling hay

The last step to our haymaking was collecting and baling the hay. It was a pretty windy day so we collected the hay using big black construction bags. We split up into two teams with everybody helping.

Then we took the hay over to the hay baler and made hay bales :) It was actually quite easy and even fun.


Compressing the hay


Open the door, and voila, a haybale!


Group effort to remove the bale from the baler.


End result


The happy balers. LOL. We made nine bales of hay, not bad for the small area we hayed. They are not at tightly compressed as what a baler could make and generally about 12 x 15 x 30" long. A nice size for our needs.

Tractor and bush hogging.

One of our friends from church noticed that we had been cutting the grass in the horseshoe section and offered his tractor and bush hog to cut the rest of our overgrown pastures. On Monday night we were invited out to other friends for dinner, and when we got home, this was waiting for us by the pasture:



So Dan called up our friend the next day (we got home very late the day before) and said: "Man! I was praying real hard for a tractor last night, and when I woke up I found this tractor sitting out there waiting for me!" Hehe.

Kidding aside, Dan has been researching and watching tractors on craigslist and local auctions.

This is what our pastures look like, they're all overgrown. The bit that is cut was cut with our trusty John Deere garden tractor, but we'll tear it up trying to cut the rest of the pasture with it.





We had to hold off on actually getting the bush hogging done, because some part needed to be welded first, so we'll get to it soon.

Making hay, yard work and more!

Dan has been keeping the "horseshoe" part of our circular driveway growing so we could try our hand at making hay. It was nice quality grass, with very few weeds. Since we don't have a scythe yet, he cut it with the JD garden tractor and then we let it dry for a bit and then raked it into windrows. We don't have hay rakes, so used regular leaf rakes. The three eldest helped.






Had to add a picture of myself too under grave duress. I hate pictures of myself.

Lots of hard work! Now to leave it to dry so we can bale it.

Today we also played a lot of catch up with mowing and general garden work. The girls and I weeded, mulched and mowed the soft fruit area so now it looks much nicer.


General view of the area


Blackberries


Raspberries


Grapes


Strawberries

Everything growing here looks really good. We haven't had any fruit from any of these plants yet, with the exception of the strawberries. The raspberries are supposed to produce in the fall, but I don't think that will be happening. The grapes had some small little grape clusters but the chickens pecked them all off, so now they are fenced. They're all really healthy though, so hopefully next year we'll have a really good crop.

Oh, while I'm at it, our beans are growing like crazy! Looking forward to picking beans. We planted Blue Lake Bush and Contender.



While we were busy with the soft fruit area, the boys were using the JD garden tractor to move logs, branches and other yard waste to our burn pile area. I don't know what we'd do without that tractor!