Easy Nesting Boxes - On the Cheap!

I've kept chickens for the last 7 years or so. I started out with a $40 dollar starter pack of 7 chickens that came with a funky coup from craigslist.com and have moved on up to a pretty decent coup. We've lost quite a few chickens to predators, mostly bobcats and raccoons, so recently Clay and I built a coup with a roof so they couldn't climb in and drag the poor girls out. It's been working really well although I've noticed some holes around the outside showing evidence of critters trying to dig tunnels in. My next project will be to reinforce the bottom - it only took me 5 years to build a proper coup so we'll see when that happens.

Over the years I've learned a lot about keeping chickens, but overall they have got to be most low maintenance pets around and being able to walk out in the yard and get fresh eggs is amazing. Besides my new coup my whole set up was very easy to put together. The hen house is a converted shed and we put together some scrap wood for a roost.

We have had some issues with making a good place for the chickens to lay eggs. Over the years the hens didn't really seem to like the shelf we made so they laid all over the coup and I kept on having issues with Chickens eating their eggs (gross!!!), so with the most recent batch of hens we wanted to get them used to laying in proper boxes.

Clay found a cool, and inexpensive, idea online to create laying boxes out of plastic tubs. (I tell you if it isn't easy we won't do it!) We cut the lids in half added some shavings and put them on our previous laying shelf.

The girls just started laying and they really seem to like the little, private laying buckets.



No comments: