The Chicken Picture Diary

This is the dividing wall my husband built, which separates the chicken coop from the lawnmower storage.  Our  first compromise was that this space had to still fit the lawnmower. Thanks to hubby's handiwork...done!

Three-year old scoping out the new chicken digs.

Hubby also built these four nesting boxes for the coop. He'll build two more so that everyone has a cozy, warm, bed to lay their eggs. He's also going to rig it so that the nesting boxes hang higher on the wall and come out easily for cleaning. 

Right now this is the back of the playhouse. Kids for two generations have jumped off the ledge there and onto that disgusting mattress buried beneath the soil. The former owner piled leaves behind the playhouse and his children would jump off into the leaves, consequently there is fantastic mulch there. Thanks to the chickens, this space will now be their sun porch. We'll enclose it with chicken wire and add a small animal door so the chickens can go in and out.

Thankfully the coop has two windows which we will help ventilate the poop smell.

This is the lawnmower storage. The fact that it's cleaned and swept out makes me want to take a million pictures of it. 

I've been taking the girls outside whenever it is warm and sunny. These pictures were taken three or four days ago. They look nothing like this now. They are much larger and have a TON more feathers. We let them run around inside of a baby gate.

Giraffe and Milly.

Giraffe, eating random things on the ground.

Blackie is the most curious of all my girls. She comes up to me easily and is always pecking around trying to figure things out.

May is the smallest in size, but is the most feisty. She's actually kind of a bitch.  She flys at the other chickens and pushes a lot of them away from the food and water.  

Julia and Molly eating their chicken mash. I can tell you that this is full of roughage for them and very frequently is not absorbed by their bodies, resulting in extremely gritty chicken poop. Which is probably why that poop is so good for gardens.

The fluff from all the chickens is quickly being replaced by feathers. I'm not sure where I thought all this fluff would go...perhaps I was hoping the fluff itself would turn into feathers...but alas, they do not. This means that I have enough chick fluff on the floors of my laundry room to make a toddler sized down pillow. I have used my vacuum more in the last two weeks than in the four years I've lived in my house.

Well, that's the girls in a nutshell. They are still cute, but that cutness is waning a bit as they grow older. They are starting to fly around the bottom of the pack n' play, so I cover the top with a baby gate. I'm getting some serious mileage out of old baby equipment. But now they are also starting to stink, which means I have to change their pen every two or three days. Oh well. I'm not mucking the coop yet so I'm not going to complain.