Castle Coop

One of the main requirements in a home when we moved here, was to find a home where we would be able to have chickens.  Our Realtor spent a lot of time reading HOA documents, till she found us our home in the county with no HOA.  Our first year here we tested the water by attending the Tour d'Coop,  a weekend festival where local backyard chicken farmers open their homes to share how they are raising backyard chickens.  

The first year was a reality check.  We learned that taking care of chickens was not like taking care of goldfish, so we decided to wait a year and get our orchard and garden established first.  That was no small task. Chris had to build huge terrace walls for me to have flat ground to garden, then wheel-barrow in truck fulls of fill dirt, compost and mulch.  He got it all done in time for me to plant in early spring(more on our progress in gardening in another post).  

This year we attended the Tour again.  Like last year, it was another busy day (baseball games for Lance, Jared and Titus in the morning, followed by Jared's Irish Dance Recital in the evening).  After this Tour, strangely instead of chickens, we seriously consider getting some rabbits (a home was giving them away for free).  However, we realized it would take a lot of work to make a rabbit hutch or a lot of money to buy one, so we decided to forego that endeavor.  Regarding chickens, the tour once again made gun shy about getting chickens.  The construction project necessary to get them set us was much greater than rabbits.

Then on May 30th, for a date, Chris and I attended a three hour lecture at NC State put on by the founders of the Tour called "Chicken Keeping 101".  The lecturer and his wife (Bob and Judy) just happened to bring seven pullets they still had available.  At the end of the lecture we felt much more comfortable.  We believed that becoming chicken keepers was attainable but Chris, being wiser than me, stopped me from bringing the seven pullets home immediately.

We spent the rest of the weekend in discussion about coops, buying or building and if building; what design we would use/create.  On Monday, we decided to contact Bob and see if he still had the pullets and how long would he would be willing to keep them while we got our coop set-up.  As it turned out they still had all seven and could wait till June 17th.  

Chris was working crazy at his real job so we spent the week planning out the design of our coop in detail on graph paper and running our final draft past Bob & Judy for review and correction.  That brings me up to my last post, where I finished questioning Sunday morning if we were going to make our Wednesday deadline.  By Sunday night the house was painted and all the sides put on, when we realized it couldn't be moved by us from the driveway to the bottom of the garden walls.  Thankfully, our kind neighbors were willing to step in and five of them helped Chris move it to its final location.  It's solid, and a bit over engineered house, we joke we should go there in a tornado.  This was not our first challenge or set back, Chris had already had to take down the walls once and put them back up in a slightly different manner, he had accidentally sawed through his circular saw cord (Grandpa put on a new cord), etc.  However, with the house was built and in place, and we had 90 minutes till Agrisupply closed.  Grandpa watched the kids and we raced over there to buy all the hardware cloth and chicken supplies we would need to finish building the run. Oh, I forgot to mention during all of this we were having a heat wave with temps in the 100s, so during the heat of the day Chris had already been to Lowes to buy the lumber for the coop, and he was doing this all while fighting a nasty chest cold of some kind.

Yet, Chris got up early Monday morning and actually framed out all four 8x12 ft. walls for the chicken coop before going to work.  While he was working at his real job the boys an I attempted to attach the hardware cloth to the frame with poultry nails as directed.  This was tremendously hard work, it took us over an hour to attach one of the twelve panels and we were all exhausted.  Grandpa Harv came home as were finishing and tried a different technique to make the process easier but even that was laborious and slow.   We decided to try screws with washers so Grandpa ended up driving all over town that day and the next morning to find the right ones (nothing about this process was easy).  After work, Chris was back at it again hoping to quickly install the roof on the house.  That of course wasn't simple or easy either (as we were led to believe).  At this point we were feeling pretty defeated because it was clear we could not get up all the walls for the run, on our uneven quartz pit, in the one night we had remaining.  We left an apologetic voicemail explaining all our set backs that made it impossible for us to pick up the chickens on Wednesday.  We went to bed that night expecting to have to look at our half complete coop the rest of the year till we could get chickens the following spring.  It was a very sad night.

The next morning, I woke up to an email from Bob saying they had post-pone going out of town till Saturday, as they had some things to finish in town.  So the race was back on.  Chris was up before work working, and back out after work till the sun set working.  Kids and I did what we could during the day and we and Grandpa helped again at night.  Dinner was around 9pm those three days.  The uneven land made it difficult to find a design that would work as a base for our walls, but we did.  After that, we had to get all the hardware cloth installed, we gave up the washer screw technique in lieu of trim pieces.  We'll have quite the coop to illustrate what to do and not to do when we enter the Tour ourselves someday.  Chris ended up taking Friday off work.  The kids and I were busy putting down the anti-vermin skirt around the coop, while Chris framed out and installed the coop door.  It was all hands on deck and at 7:30pm on threat of major rain we put in the last screw, then called Bob and Judy to tell them we were ready to pick up the girls.

I took this as we were leaving to pick up girls.

The inside of the coop with perches on Saturday, 3 nest boxes in back.

We still hadn't eaten dinner and we thought everyone deserved at treat, so we picked up Chick-fil-A on our way north.  It was a 40 min. drive to their house and the skies opened up along the way.  It was pouring down rain when we arrived at their home.  They had wisely packed up the girls as the rain threatened in an old cardboard box so they were able to hand them off to us without much ado.  

Stormy

I sat the box, with the chickens, in it on my lap in the car.  We were all fascinated at the variety of vocalizations they made.  We tried to use reassuring tones to calm them, as we proceeded to try to come up with names, still never having seen the chickens in the dark and the rain.  Jared came up with the first name "Stormy", which we later appointed to our Coop ambassador.  Titus came up with next name "Dandelion", whom we now call "Dandy", she's our other white chicken with a yellow spot on her back.  Lance chose "Rosie" for one of the blacks but to this day I must admit I can not tell the difference between the five blacks based on any variation in their markings.  As a result, two were given names based on their behavior but we can't distinguish them when they are calm in a group; the one that frequently rials everyone up (for seeming no reason) we have given the name "Lady Catherine de Coop", another makes an odd sound, so we call her "The Triller". As a collective Amber said they should be called "the girls", not "the ladies".  She's also named one of the blacks "Amber Elizabeth" but once again we don't know which one.

Rosie

So through much trial, we are now chicken owners.  Chris finished putting in a few final touches (like the perches) on Saturday and then got some much needed rest to recoup (no pun intended) from exhaustion and his illness.  Needless to say we took the past week off from much of anything.  The girls do provide a lot of entertainment, and now that the building phase is over very little work.  We are free ranging them a little, when were out working in the garden, but careful of the abundance of predators about (Opossum and fox who live on our property and the numerous hawks and owls flying around). 

The girls coming in from a walk-a-bout.

Details:  The Chickens are Brahma Bantams and are actually from three different hatching in the spring.  The youngest is "Stormy", hatched April 11th, but she's also the most personal; outgoing and confident, meeting us at the door and letting us hold her.  The rest of the chickens (in every sense of the word) follow her lead.  I assume Rosie is the black one that hatched with Dandy(our other white with yellow spot) on April 5th.  The four we can't tell apart are the blacks from the first hatching on March 27th.  Bob and Judy bred their chickens first for temperament.  Then when they had that figured out they started breeding for the biggest eggs.  We got them for the temperament, we'll find out in a month or two about the eggs.  We are already planning for new chickens in the spring.  However, phase two of construction will be bit more laid back over the cooler months of the coming fall.

This young buck came by to check out the coop on June 22nd.  Our girls are quite the curiosity of ALL our neighbors.