I'm with you..

Posted on Wednesday, March 7, 2007 at 11:38 by fooddude

I like your response on Nancys Quilting Blog. I'll never look at Paul the same again. Do you think he has a hem ripper and one of those little tomato looking thing that you stick pins and needles into? (Scarry!!) I read your blog about getting the new chickens from the post office. We like our hens. The roosters are jerks. Well there is only one rooster now and he's not that bad. The other rooster jumped at Jon our 5 year old and scratched him on the face. Me and him and Mr. Mossburg (20 gauge) had a little heart to heart talk when I got home that day. Lets just say we wont have to worry about him doing any scratching again. I'll tell you what worked really good for us when we had baby chicks. Take 2 kiddie swimming pools, like you buy on the sidewalk at your local Wally World. Turn one over on top of the other ,( think giant clam) Drill small holes in the top one for ventilation and a big cut out hole (12-14 inches) in the middle of the top one for the heat lamp. You can hold them together with spring clamps. We put cedar shavings in the bottom of ours to cut down on the smell as well as for absorption reasons.
My written description probably doesn't make a lot of sense, so I'll try to send you some pictures sometime.

Take care and Beware the Roosters!

Tony Carter (Nancys Husband)

Hello Fooddud!

Posted on Thursday, March 8, 2007 at 09:44 by geoff

I like the idea with the pool a lot. I had heard this also from you wife a while back but didn't understand how you were using the two.
We always have an abundance of boxes and no money so we created what you see here. The down fall was that moisture went through the box (gross) and straw does not work well as an absorbent or odor catcher. The plus was that when the smell got bad, we just burned it all.
The next time that we had chicks we used wood shavings like you. That was an excellent absorber and odor catcher. We did not have to change the box nearly as often compared to straw and never had the odor as bad. The only issue was that we had to change the water several times a day because the chicks we had (dark Cornish) scratch so much that even if we put the water 1/2 inch off the wood shavings, they would scratch all the wood into it. (It was sick too). You can see from the pictures that we had the waters that were the quart sized plastic containers with the red top.
This last time that we had chicks I modified our Rabbit Cage (that I had built) and put the smallest square welded wire.... fence?... roll?... whatever it is called.... that I could find on the bottom. It was a roll and the squares were about 1/4 square, maybe smaller. Stuck the cage on top of wood shavings and have fixed my issue. I am not sure if this is the best solution and have my reserves about it but you will have to wait till I catch up to present on this blog. I wanted to make this blog a record from the time we moved here to present and on. I think I should be caught up by the end of this month.
Thanks for your post!

Ya know...

Posted on Thursday, March 8, 2007 at 10:29 by UnlikelyHomesteader

One good thing about using the cardboard boxes, besides the fact that they are FREE is that you could actually compost them directly in your garden.

Our first year put the shavings/chicken poop in our raised boxes and when it got time to plant our tomatoes, we mixed the compost from the red box into the soil, and wow we had awesome tomatoes that year!

Now we've got a rabbit so we'll have even more good fertilizer. Who knew that stuff was so valuable?!