The Four Seasons of Coops
If one thing that was good that came out of the COVID pandemic…it is our fabulous coop!
After we purchased our second round of chickens, we decided we need another/bigger coop to house all of our girls! But this is the crazy part…everyone crazy during COVID and started raising chickens around here! There was not a single “reasonable” coop to be found…so we took the plunge and bought this mac daddy coop! And it is glorious!
This is supposed to house around 13 chickens! Ours fit comfortably with some room to add a few more (haha…never say never)! There is plenty of storage inside to keep extra supplies as well!
And this is the beginning of the Fort Knox of all coops! We were tired of our girls dying due to predators, so it was time to find a better solution! We first built a run to keep them in. Our goal was to try to keep the raccoons from getting to them! We put concrete under the fence and planned on putting barbwire over the top….but then the hawks picked them off from over head! We couldn’t catch a break…our poor girls! So then we put a top over half of the run and put a divider in. We bumped the coop right up to the divider! So if we decided to keep them in the covered part of the run they could still come and go into the coop, but if we wanted to let them completely out, we could open the other door as well! Fingers crossed it works!
Move in day! Had no idea it would also take a tractor to lift over our chicken run!
Our original coop! As you can see…the new one is a major upgrade!
Well…it wasn’t Fort Knox…yet!
One day I was in the kitchen and looked out the window to see Byrdie and JP (my nephew) staring at one of the girls on the ground! I went outside to inspect and was greeted with, “Mommy, she’s dead (said with a very country accent!).” JP: “yup, dead!” Byrdie: “a raccoon got her!” JP: “it was a mole!” Byrdie: “it was a raccoon!” I informed them it was most likely a raccoon as the poor thing was headless! A raccoon and snuck it’s arm under the one of the 2 sides that did not have concrete under the fence! Those raccoons are relentless! I had been trapping and killing those things for week (please don’t be angry with me about that part….but I was just protecting my girls!)
So I did what any normal person would do….go buy massive amounts of sakrete and go to town on it! Well, let me rephrase, call in sweet college boys to help put the sakrete down! The backside fence did not have concrete underneath it due tot he fact we bumped the pipe fence up to a barb-wired fence, but that didn’t stop those mean suckers! Nor did the new fence we put in the middle to separate the covered part from the coop.
Nothing sweeter than your son and his friends coming to the rescue!