And that goes against how most of us were raised: with the idea that grass must be mowed and neat.
But not mowing our chicken yard means native trees and shrubs have started to grow. We now have about a dozen Oregon ash trees, a few Pacific crabapples, what might be a hawthorn (?), and a couple of native roses all happily growing without being planted.
If we had kept mowing our chicken yard, we wouldn’t have any of that. We would have the one sickly looking non-native tree we planted before we learned differently. (Full disclosure: We planted three and two died. Duh. Of course they died. They weren’t native.)
Seeing the native trees and plants growing tells me we are doing the right thing by letting this quarter acre be wild and messy. But it is taking a while to get used to, I admit. To me, it looks like we don’t care, when the opposite is true: It looks like this because we DO care!
Plus I posted about this on TikTok and people made comments that helped me realize other benefits: more bugs for the chickens to eat and more predator protection for the chickens. Definitely two more good reasons to not mow our chicken yard!
It has been sooooo crazy busy with the two “situations” that took over my life in March 2022 that I didn’t even notice we were one hen short at night. Bob and Emma count chickens when they close up the coop at night. I don’t. So imagine my surprise when late one night–after a veeeeerrryyy looooong day–I heard the cheeping of chicks and found a mama hen with babies outside the coop door. It was too dark to do anything with them, so I hoped for the best and asked Bob to check on them when he got home in the middle of the night. He did and they were still there.
In the morning, I lifted up the hen to find not a few new chicks, but nine! Nine! Every single one of them was perfect and before long they were toddling along after their mama, learning the ropes of chickenhood.
There’s something about babies, even chicken babies, that makes one’s heart swell.
But what a sneaky (although very good!) mom to have disappeared somewhere, and I’ve no idea where, to hatch these little beauties when I didn’t know she was missing.
And I still don’t know where she hid to do her hatching!
When I accidentally killed chickens moving the chicken tractor, I whined about it on Facebook. That led to people asking me, “What is a chicken tractor?” There are lots of types of chicken tractors and I hesitated to talk about ours because it’s not fitting for what we’re trying to do now, but it’s all we’ve got and it’s the perfect setup for someone in the city wanting to raise backyard chickens for fresh eggs!
So I share photo and some details about it here:
This contraption was built for me when I lived in the city. It was built for six hens and it was perfect for six hens. I’d move it around the yard once or twice a day and let the girls go at a small area of grass or bugs, then move them to fresh ground. It kept them safe while also keeping them moving and wow, did it do wonders for the lawn! Those girls made healthy green grass!
Eventually I started leaving the lid up and the girls would go wherever they wanted, including across the street (which led to many jokes about why the chicken crossed the road plus the one really embarrassing time when my chickens had traffic blocked and I could hear horns honking and I hid in my house waiting for it to all end!). But they always came back to roost at night.
It is portable plus the part that sticks out is the nesting box with room for three chickens at a time, and the lid lifts up for easy access to the eggs.
When I first moved to the country, I brought this with me along with my six hens and it worked great. Since moving to our small farm and building our chicken coop, we’ve used this chicken tractor to transition chicks from the “nursery bin” to outside, before they get moved into the chicken coop with the grownups.
The reason it has gone from chicken tractor to death machine recently is because I had too many chickens in it–fat, slow moving Frankenbabies.
But if you’re thinking about raising backyard chickens for fresh eggs on a small piece of property, something like this kind of chicken tractor is perfect! If you want more photos of it, like with the lids up, let me know. It even has a roosting bar going across the middle, which the girls always loved to use!
Moving forward, once my husband is finally home, we’ll build a more portable chicken tractor with room for more chickens, because we are going to keep the egg layers in the coop, and use the portable contraption for meat chickens only. That will make it much more lightweight because it won’t have the nesting box! And I will insist that it be as lightweight as it can possibly be so I can easily move it by myself, deployment or no deployment! (I’m thinking PVC pipe and tarp!) I don’t know what that looks like yet, because it still has to be strong enough to keep the coyotes out, so it can’t be totally lightweight, but we’ll figure it out. 🙂
I hope that answers any questions about chicken tractors, but if not, ask away. I am learning lots about starting a small farm by doing things wrong the first time!
Ten days ago, these little buggers showed up in the mail. They’ve been in a pen in the barn until tonight when I moved them to the chicken tractor. I didn’t want to move them to the chicken tractor tonight! The weather has cooled and it was rainy part of the day and windy all of it. But they are Frankenbabies and I couldn’t keep the little eating/pooping/growing machines cooped up (pardon the pun) any longer. Even with adding new bedding twice a day, I couldn’t keep their cage clean, they make so much poop.
See, these are Cornish Cross chickens, monsters bred for industrial ag…bred to grow unbelievably fast in a factory farm and provide cheap meat for our grocery stores at a rapid (and cheap) pace. We grew this breed the first two years we had meat chickens and I swore never again. The last time we raised Red Broilers instead and were very happy with their normal growth rate. In fact, we still have three from well over a year because they started laying eggs. Cornish Cross chickens don’t get to age. They can grow so fast that their legs can’t support their weight. It’s awful. And it’s what you typically find in the grocery store. Yuck.
But I wanted to make sure we had chicken in the freezer for winter eating when Bob gets back from his deployment which meant ordering some summer chicks, and when I placed my order, the hatchery was sold out of Red Broilers and sent me the Cornish Cross kind instead.
Well, at least I know I can schedule the mobile slaughter guy ahead of time, because these birds grow like clockwork!
It is sad, how fast they grow. They are bred to simply eat and eat and eat (which means they also poop and poop and poop). This time around, I am only feeding twice a day, not letting them eat whenever like I’ve done in the past. I am hoping to make their growth at least a little more normal. And they will–unlike their factory farmer counterparts–be out on grass and eating bugs for their short lives.
Our goal as we start a farm is to get as self sustaining as possible and hatch our own chicks. That’s why we got our rooster in the first place. But the farmhouse renovation has been so all-encompassing that the only baby chick we’ve had born on the farm so far was a surprise. Still, it’s what we are aiming for, so these Frankenbabies are like the green beans I bought from a local farmer last week: They get us closer to our goal of being in control of much of our food supply, although our end goal is to do it ourselves.
And we won’t be raising Cornish Crosses, no way! No, our handsome rooster is a Speckled Sussex and when the renovation if done, we’ll shop around for some Sussex hens and take it from there.
For now, I’ve got a night of worry ahead of me as I’m sure I moved the Frankenbabies outside too soon, but… I spent quite a while wrapping the chicken tractor in tarps to keep the wind and rain out, and I put in a block of wood as a step to help them get into the box, and if in the morning I no longer have 16 live chicks, well, that’s farming and a lesson learned. 🙂
Tonight mama hen and baby chick are on the top rung of the ladder. From nesting box and being nestled under mama’s feathers to roosting like a big chick and preening itself all pretty. That baby is growing up so fast!
Mama and baby on the top rung of the roosting ladder. Such a grownup now!
We haven’t had eggs in 5 weeks. We’ve finally deduced the crows are going into the chicken coop to eat the eggs. It’s time to finally do something about this now that we’ve identified the culprit(s). Emma’s idea for a scarecrow seemed like a great way to fight those dastardly birds, and she worked hard yesterday putting something scary together. This morning, however, when I went to let the chickens out of the coop, two crows were on the ground in the chicken yard, right near the scarecrow.
Now, I think it’s scary! Since she set it up outside the coop yesterday afternoon, it has given me a fright at least a half dozen times. Every time I go around the corner to go into the chicken yard, I jump, thinking someone is in there.
Not so much for the crows.
My idea didn’t fare any better. My idea was to hang baling twine in the doorway, just above the floor so the chickens would still go in and out, but in the way of crows “flying” in, because I assume they fly in. And we had to have some baling twine, because the whole endeavor just cries out for a redneck touch.
However, my idea didn’t fare any better. I still found broken eggshells in the coop today. The only reason I got any eggs was my audacity in reaching under the girls as they sat in the nesting boxes. And that only netted us two eggs, as well as some serious squawking as they complained.
Next up is killing the crows, I’m sorry to say…not sorry because I feel for the crows. I don’t. They are taking our food. But sorry because before Bob left, he made sure I was proficient with the shotgun, but not the 22. And I really don’t want to go out shooting shot all over and possibly hurting one of our chickens
So next on the list? Getting a tutorial on the 22 from the neighbor, or else asking the neighbor to simply pick off the dang crows!!
Five weeks without eggs is definitely five weeks too long and my patience is all used up. If it takes a 22 to be a success when starting a small farm, I’m all for it.
It has been so long since I have updated this website about our farmhouse renovation and attempt to start a farm that I don’t even know where to start. Honestly. That’s one reason it has been so long: It gets to a point where catching up seems impossible, making it that much harder to even say anything.
The biggest development for us is the fact that Bob is in the Middle East, beginning a six-month deployment. The other is the bank’s insistence that we “finish” the house, paying out of pocket for all kinds of things neither we nor the bank could foresee when we bought the house (like falling down walls, as just one little example). Much more has happened, but those are the two biggies affecting this farmhouse renovation right now.
Just those two issues alone are a lot to tackle in an update, and I’m not sure I want to. So I decided I would simply start with today and some photos. You won’t see anything of the inside of the house, or the house at all, but there’s a reason for that: I want to get this dang house DONE and have my husband come home to a real home, not a to-do list the size of Mt. Everest. I want to surprise him with finished projects, not in progress ones. My plan is to post photos as things get done. 🙂
In the meantime, I gotta say something! So let’s start with today. Today is June 8 2013. Today is the day I start updating our website on a regular basis again. And today…
….our surprise baby chick ventured outside with mama for the first time. Watching it explore the big wide world while sticking close to mama’s side took the level of cuteness for the day off the charts. 🙂
This is Mel, our beautiful Speckled Sussex rooster…the first of what has turned into three roosters!
While trying to start a farm and figure out the poultry part of it, we’ve realized we’ll need two different chicken setups: one for our laying hens and one for raising our own meat chickens.
Now when I say raising our own, I mean by having a rooster and hens and eggs and nesting and chicks…the whole old fashioned farming way. I don’t mean by heading to the feedstore every spring for chicks to raise, although that’s likely the way it will be for at least the next year.
This is one of the surprise Plymouth Barred Rock roosters we ended up with…instead of a layer!
When we are to the point with starting a farm when we are raising livestock, we hope to be raising heritage breeds for our chickens, pigs and cattle. So part of my starting a farm research into poultry has been into the heritage breeds best suited to provide both laying and meat chickens.
This is basic elementary stuff, people, but all new to me! So new, I don’t know a single person who does this…raising their own chickens “from scratch” (pardon the pun). I have, of course, turned to the Internet for information. For information about the heritage breeds, I’ve contacted the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy. They sent a chicken chart: five pages of heritage breeds with information on origin, egg production, meat quality, rate of growth, and more.
Another shot of Mel. Maybe we choose to keep him because he’s the prettiest?
Using that, I narrowed our selection down to five possibilities. One of these was the Sussex. So when a Sussex rooster showed up on Freecycle.org, I jumped at the chance to get him for three reasons: 1) it made our breed decision for us by default, 2) we knew we’d have a rooster as opposed to buying chicks and not being sure, and 3) he was free and full grown.
And he was a beauty when I got him home and opened that taped up box, oh my! (His owner was so anxious to get rid of him, he essentially shoved the sealed box into my arms before I was hardly out of the truck!)
Now, getting this rooster is admittedly jumping the gun. We don’t have housing for our meat chickens. We don’t even have any Sussex hens yet or plans to get them any time soon. Still, it seemed the right thing to do.
We named him Mel, but then had some issues with him attacking the step son and hubby. He can be very aggressive. I heard the stories, then finally experienced it myself twice. He’s a fraction of my size but when he goes on the attack, he’s quite a scary sight! I started carrying a stick each time I went into the coop or the chicken yard, as did the guys, and his aggression seems to have subsided. I think in part because he got whacked a couple of times, and in part because he only got aggressive when someone was picking up the food buckets.
And the Plymouth Barred Rock again…pretty but mean! Should he be dinner??
But it could have also been the fact that he was in horrible pain! He limped from the day we got him. I’d watch him hop and I could see there was something weird about one foot. Finally I caught him to get a look. He had a string tied around two toes, so tightly, that it cut into his skin to the bone! Not only that, this string was tying his BACK toe to one of his front ones! I felt soooo bad for him! He must have come that way. We don’t have any string like that around our small farm and it was obvious that the string had been digging into the bigger toe for weeks if not months. He held perfectly still while Bob cut the string and he seems to be feeling better every day as the limp lessens. Now, that would have made ME grumpy and aggressive!
OK, enough about Mel. Now here’s the dilemma: Of the six layer chicks we bought this spring, two are roosters. Not only are two roosters, both of our Plymouth Barred Rocks are roosters. What are the chances?? When buying the chicks, we bought two Rhode Island Reds, two Buff Orpingtons, and two of the Barred Rocks. And both Barred Rocks grew up to be boys. Not just boys, but aggressive, bratty boys. They don’t attack us the way Mel did for a while, but they attack the hens in a very mean way.
At first I thought we had two roosters. I knew we had Mel. But then I heard two roosters crowing one morning. The step son already thought one of the Barred Rocks was a rooster but I didn’t because it looked exactly like the other one…and if one were a rooster and one a hen, they would look different. But then I not only heard him crow, I saw him crow. So we knew for sure: We had two roosters.
Now what to do? I checked the chart and the Rock was a suitable breed for us too. Keep the Rock? Keep Mel? One had to go. But why, oh why, did the two Barred Rocks look the same, I wondered? Could they both be roosters? No way!
Yes way. A few days later, I heard three roosters crowing!
So now we must decide which one to keep. I still like Mel. He’s beautiful and although we have had issues with him coming after us, he doesn’t bully the hens the way the other two do. As for those two, they are beautiful…too beautiful to eat, although that’s a possibility. Or we could take them to the weekly poultry auction and get some money for them.
Or we sell Mel, and keep the Barred Rock roosters. Or one of them.
Not sure yet just what we’ll do. And for now, it doesn’t matter since we don’t have the hens we want bred anyway. It’s just one little thing—one more little thing among hundreds—that we have to sort out as we work on starting a farm!
But really, what are the chances that both our Plymouth Barred Rock chicks would grow up to be boys??
In the past few days, Bob and his son Jake were able to pick up where Andrew left off before leaving for vacation to get the chicken coop almost done, and Emma and I were able to help with the painting. All it lacks right now is a roof. We got some of the chickens and all of the turkeys moved in, and we acquired a rooster. This coop is for our layers, when we have layers. It is big enough for 33 busy little hens to do their thing. We will build a separate coop in the garden area for meat chickens later, when we’ve figured out how to be self sustaining and raise our own chicks. (Which is why I jumped at the chance for a free Sussex rooster!)
For now, we have layers, fryers and turkeys all mixed together in what we hope is a coyote-proof fortress! I didn’t blog about this, so I guess I should explain: We had a coyote attack a few weeks ago and lost all 17 of our layer chickens in one night. This thing is built to be solid and we might even run electric fencing along the bottom too. Stupid coyotes.
No, the coop isn’t done, but the poultry is protected at least, and they have a nicer place to live now than I do! It’s allllll baby steps at Literal Road Farm.
Check out the chicks’ new digs below!
The chicken coop yay! With a cool gate Bob made from salvaged boards. Still to come? Roof, gutters…and yes, cute little hanging flower baskets.
Here’s a side view of the coop, showing you the girls’ very nice view towards the hills.
This is our new rooster, Mel, who came to us for free via Freecycle. He’s a Specked Sussex rooster, a heritage breed. Our plan is to get Sussex hens to breed him with for both egg and meat chickens. He is a character and a delight!
Inside the coop, we are set up for 33 layers…although the coyotes set us back by 17 chickens, we will someday have that many. The roosting bars are an old ladder that was in the barn cut in half.
We built the coop onto the back of the barn. The windows were found in the barn. We knocked out what was left of the glass and painted the frames white, then nailed them over screens. The coop is very nicely ventilated, and we’ll cover up the windows with plastic in the winter. The only thing is, the coop is so new, it makes everything else around it look even shabbier!
