All right, it's time for those 14 Ameraucana chicks to get OUT of my basement! They are totally stinking up the place and we have a huge poop+shavings+food mess to clean up down there.
The only reason they are still down there is housing! The old hen house and the old brooder house are on the FAR side of the property and need fixing up. While slapping a little more wood over gaps and cleaning them out is the EASIEST way to house them, it is so far from our house, that I'm not wanting to do that. I can't even see the coops from the house, and I really did dream of watching the chickens from my house, or the porch, or something!
We had hoped to build a chicken tractor, but Steve has been so busy with work we haven't done anything yet. He's getting home late at night and working weekends at the moment, so he hasn't had any time to build anything ... or to mow. We want to move them outside this weekend, so we're looking for what can be accomplished quickly.
Last Spring when we moved the guineas (5 of them, only 1 still living) outside, we moved them into a little fenced area beside the house that had a doghouse in it. It was supposed to be temporary and we were going to let them wander the property freely once they were older. Well, it didn't work out that way thanks to the dog we adopted shortly after that, and the one guinea still lives in there, although he rarely uses the doghouse anymore. He just sits out in the rain and snow. Seriously!
That isn't ideal for the chickens. We want them to have a proper home with nesting boxes and roosts. But if I can't come up with an easy solution, Steve's going to put them in with the guinea this weekend, regardless of having built a coop or not. If we do that, I'd likely put a tarp over one end of the fence and it's chicken wire ceiling, to provide some shelter from the rain. And it would be temporary!
But I really would prefer ideas. What alternate chicken coop or tractor ideas have you come up with? Anything that can be built in a day? Do I just need to quit whining, fix up the old coops, and start walking way over there, where I can't even see the chickens from my house, several times a day? That will be a bummer ... can't imagine not being able to watch them from my house as I'd dreamed of doing.
Chicken help needed ... please leave comments with ideas!
(Speaking of the guinea, it does this weird posture thing when I go out to feed it, and I can't decide if it resembles a female trying to lay an egg, or a male taking on a mating stance. No, I don't know what gender the guinea is. We bought 5 straight run guineas. I suspect male, though.)
I really don't have any ideas for a chicken coop really--as far as a tractor type thing my husband made me on out of 2 x4's and screen wire with little wheels on it--he made it in just a few hours with scrap lumber--anyway to know the difference in a male and female guinea go here and listen to the sounds each make-- Hope this helps you determine which you have!
Posted by ElCloud on 2009-Apr-30 at 10:49 AM - Link
Okay, so based on those sounds ... she's a girl. That was a helpful website.
It sounds like we had some guys, but they died. (One due to our dog, 2 in the winter, and one to some other critter.) I wonder how many boys/girls we had originally. We'll get more guineas this summer, too.
We are a Christian homeschooling family with 7 children (ages 13, 12, 10, 8, 5, 3, and 9 months). We love having "room to breathe" in rural Central Kansas, and are working to make the "family homeplace" our own home.
