12/8/2023 0 Comments Movable chicken coopWe worked with Joe Ramey of Circo Innovations in Grass Valley, Calif. The birds shelter in an enclosure at one end made of the same durable yet easy-to-work corrugated plastic that the postal service uses in its mail tubs, and a cleverly fitted 5-gallon pail with a special cover serves as a nest box. Like its portable predecessors, this coop-with-run is designed for three to four chickens. A removable panel of 2-by-4-inch welded wire mesh covers the bottom, which gives the chickens room to scratch but is easy to take off if you wish to set the coop on a garden bed and let the chickens till in their manure. This pen is framed with 1-inch Schedule 40 plastic pipe, and its walls are covered with 1-by-2-inch welded wire mesh. Now we have a new and improved incarnation of the portable chicken coop with your choice of shapes. This portable coop with a welded iron frame is solid and predator-proof indeed, and it will last forever, but Long reports the steel frame makes it too heavy for some people to move easily (and you’d have to find a welder to build it for you if you don’t have that skill). It’s sized to fit on a raised garden bed so the chickens can till up the soil with their scratching. Undaunted, Long next designed an ultra-sturdy coop, MOTHER’s Mighty Chicken-Mobile, in 2011’s Build an Affordable, Portable and Predator-Proof Chicken Coop. Unfortunately, the run’s unframed wire mesh walls are not strong enough to prevent large dogs from smashing them down and killing the chickens, as Long sadly learned. This super-lightweight, low-cost option works fine if you can place it inside a fenced yard or garden. “It’s intended for three or four hens, costs only about $100 in materials and can be assembled in a few hours from standard welded wire fencing.” This portable chicken coop plan includes an inexpensive plastic doghouse, slightly modified, to shelter the chickens. “I set out to create a coop design that would be low-cost, easy to build, light enough to move easily and scaled to fit well even in small backyards,” Long wrote. In 2007, Long presented another coop idea in Portable Chicken Mini-Coop Plan. However, the coop requires a fair amount of carpentry skills to build, and the cost of the materials and the required tools are beyond some folks’ budgets. Created after Maxwell and Long conferred with poultry experts, the coop is a gorgeous piece of work (read more about it in MOTHER’s Mini-Coop) meant to last for years. One early version, designed in 2003 by MOTHER EARTH NEWS contributing editor Steve Maxwell and Editor-in-Chief Cheryl Long, was a wooden A-frame affair with wheels on one end to help make it easy for one person to move. The perfect coop should be lightweight and easy to build - even for a child or an older person - yet it must be sturdy enough to keep predators away from the birds, and it shouldn’t cost too much money. Over the years, MOTHER EARTH NEWS has offered several DIY chicken coop plans, particularly designs for portable chicken coops. Hens are great converters of kitchen waste into valuable manure for the garden, and every chicken owner we know takes a lot of pleasure in just watching the chickens noodle around in the yard.īut free-range birds are often taken by foxes, bobcats, hawks, dogs or other predators, so unless you have guardian dogs that can keep predators away, your best option is probably a portable chicken coop that gives the chickens access to fresh grass and dirt every day while also keeping them protected. Birds kept in a portable chicken coop on pasture provide delicious, inexpensive eggs, and eggs from birds that get plenty of grass, bugs and seeds to eat are better for you than store-bought eggs (read the results of our egg nutrition testing in The Good Egg). Having a few laying hens in the backyard has almost become the icon of today’s self-sufficiency movement. This portable predator proof chicken coop DIY is low-cost and easy to make for just about anyone. We’ve got one of the best predator proof chicken coop plans.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |