• Hi all and welcome to TheWoodHaven2 brought into the 21st Century, kicking and screaming! We all have Alasdair to thank for the vast bulk of the heavy lifting to get us here, no more so than me because he's taken away a huge burden of responsibility from my shoulders and brought us to this new shiny home, with all your previous content (hopefully) still intact! Please peruse and feed back. There is still plenty to do, like changing the colour scheme, adding the banner graphic, tweaking the odd setting here and there so I have added a new thread in the 'Technical Issues, Bugs and Feature Requests' forum for you to add any issues you find, any missing settings or just anything you'd like to see added/removed from the feature set that Xenforo offers. We will get to everything over the coming weeks so please be patient, but add anything at all to the thread I mention above and we promise to get to them over the next few days/weeks/months. In the meantime, please enjoy!

This weekend I have been mostly recycling

AndyP

AndyP

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This weekend I have been mostly recycling.

My father had his aluminium sliding doors replaced last month and he kept the old hardwood frames for me.
The six longer pieces at the bottom were too long to get into the car and I did not want to cut them until I knew what I was going to do with them. They will be picked up some time in August.



After ripping down to approx 2x1



And batch drilling the corner braces



I found some old angle plates and drilled some new holes more suitable for the screws



I was then able to make the first of six of these



The will be used to extend our existing chicken coop and run



Our 4 hens


And the two new arrivals



The large run is used by the chooks during the day when they are not in the garden. At night and when we are on holiday they use this secure smaller run.



I’ll be moving the sleeping/nest box back a few meters and adding an extra 3.5m of covered run at the far end where the panelled sides are.



The six panels currently under construction with provide the sides to the new run. I’ll have to wait until August before I can make the roof.

A bit agricultural I know and I would have liked to splash out on all new pressure treated timber and do a pucker construction a la Bob's fruit cage but quite frankly the cost is not easy to justify when I can make use of "free" timber. Always satisfying to do a job without spending a penny on materials. Well only the wire mesh.
 
Mark, I do not know what her reservations are obviously but my own limited experience is thus.

Free range organic eggs might not taste any different but the colour of the yolk is VERY yellow. This is due to the grass they eat I believe. Home made quiches come out an entirely different colour when compared with any sort of supermarket eggs.

They are very easy to keep. I clean the sleeping box just once a week - sometimes fortnightly and it all goes in the compost.

They can be left alone for two weeks providing they have enough water and food. But their eggs do need removing or they will get broody, sit on them and stop laying. Any eggs our neighbour finds when we are away she keeps - an arrangement that suits us both.

We get eggs every month of the year but production drops due to lack of light, not temperature. If you rig up artificial light in their coop you can get eggs all year around.

If you can persuade the missus try and get some bantams, they are small, cute and of you get pure breeds and they can be very pretty.
 
You don't have to Rod, and I am not sure that they stop laying just slow down a lot. And what is wrong with eating a chicken that has been given a far better life then anything you could buy?

I have had to "despatch" 3 cocks ( we bought them as hen chicks but they had a gender change :D ). We ate them all. I can't say that I enjoyed the process but was quite satisfied that it was not that difficult. A valuable lesson for the kids too.
 
Nothing wrong with that at all but I know it puts some people off from keeping them.
Similar problem with Racing Pigeons when they become too old to be competitive.

Rod
 
I understand that but it would be a shame if anyone was put off keeping chickens because they might need to be killed. Funny how attitudes have changed within the space of 2 or 3 generations. It is not hard to despatch a chicken and it is easy to find out how.

My grandfather never had the benefit of youtube to show him how.
 
My MIL keeps chickens and I agree 100% about the yolks. The colour is stunning. There is also a massive difference in texture. Both the yolks and the whites are far more firm and more viscous than the runny palid rubbish you get from caged birds. For all forms of cooking they're far superior, omelettes, boiled, poached, quiche, you name it. Home made mayo....no contest with the conjealed "sperm" you get in pre-packed jars.

Foxes and rats...they're the problems.....
 
Hunting is a "sport" that is not frowned upon around here and I have yet to see a fox (road kill or otherwise) at any time of the day nor night, although I am assured that they are around.

Never seen a rat around here either.

The smaller of our two runs was designed to be rat and fox proof with ½" galvanised wire mesh all around. The outside of both runs also has a larger gauge 50mm mesh buried and extends out buy about two feet to deter foxes digging to get in.
 
Here is the finished, for now, chicken run. When the rest of the timber arrives I will make some hinged sections for the roof which will enable me to get in and clean when necessary.

I'm also on the hunt for a railway sleeper or two so I can remove the unsightly breeze blocks.



 
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