Poultry Palace

November 23, 2009

One of our many fall projects was the remodeling and relocation of our chicken house. Originally, Keith and our sons built it with the goal of moving it around the pastures behind the cows to allow the chickens fresh grass on a daily basis. We found this to be more trouble than it was worth, primarily because it required hauling out water everyday (the cows walk themselves in for water) So we settled the chicken house closer to our house but in the middle of our goat pasture.



Over the last few years it started to show wear and tear. We decided to fix the areas needing attention AND move it even closer to the house. Well I decided that and Keith complied because he is just that way. It now stands directly between the farmwives kitchen and calf hutches, making it very easy to water and feed the birds on my way to feed calves and then collect eggs on my way back to the house. And because more customers are buying our products directly off the farm , this CEO of first impressions wanted the coop to have both form and function.

Thus, in addition to repairing and repainting the coop, the guys (including husband, sons, nephew and my brother each doing different parts of the job on different days) built a new attached chicken yard surrounded by white picket fence gifted to me by friend Kristy. I wanted cute and that is what they gave me.



The chickens have been running loose all summer, laying eggs willy nilly while we remodeled their abode. The barn was amess with their moulting feathers everywhere. Now they are back in a more controlled setting as we re-teach them to use the very lovely nest boxes filled with fresh wood shavings. Soon we should again have a regular supply of eggs to offer to visitors along with beef, poultry, honey and milk.

I'd still like to get the feed shed (to the left of the chicken coop) repainted white but its a little low on our priority list this fall. That's probably a good thing as I would hate to run out of things to put on our Spring To-Do list.