Poultry shed: first waddles
December 10th, 2009We’ve now gotten far enough along to make a progress report on our poultry project.
After a fabulous meal of “duck three ways” prepared for us at the farm by friends visiting from Portland, we’ve decided that this coming year we’re going to raise ducks. Ducks and duck eggs are too expensive to buy for our own consumption. Conversely, they yield a lot of profit for the effort – much more so than chickens, even free-range, organic chickens.
We’ve raised chickens before in the past, giving up on most recent attempt because a fox was making away with one every night. That was painful to wake up to each morning. So we gave the remnants of our flock away to someone with more secure facilities, before the chickens all disappeared.
So one key is a predator-proof shelter where the poultry can be safely locked away each night.
The design we settled on is based on Gene Logsdon’s design for a chicken coop, posted at The Energy Bulletin.
Okay, so ducks don’t roost or use nest boxes (at least that’s what we’re told) – but we want a flexible design to accommodate whatever poultry we might want to raise in the future. The roosts and nesting boxes can always be added if necessary.
We had a run-down shed that at one time served as our lambing shed (we’ve since build much better lambing facilities inside the barn itself). We figured we could move the shed to its new home and then rebuild it for its new purpose.
First, the shed had to be reinforced a bit and all the rotten parts replaced. Then moving it proved to be more of a challenge than I thought. I had moved it once before, dragging it with the tractor from its old home to a spot within the area fenced for the sheep – but that was years ago in the summer, when the ground was dry and hard. Now that the rains have commenced, the ground is soft and slippery and the tractor couldn’t get any traction. The key proved to be jacking it up on fence posts laid down as rollers and rolling it to its new location, running the rollers from the back to the front as we went.
So here it is, in its new location and partially reconstructed.
Alright, so it doesn’t look like much – it’s a work in progress.
Just wait ’till we’re through, and ’til its flocking with ducks!