Welcome back to the blog!
Mr. L. has started planning some of the big spring projects. If you’ve been reading along, you know that we’re adding a couple of heritage breeds of chickens to our homestead this spring. A dozen of each, straight run, with the intention to keep a rooster and 2-3 hens of each breed for eggs, and 2020 spring chicks, and to butcher and eat the rest come fall.
We have had significant chicken losses to local predators, so the challenge is always keeping our chicks alive long enough for them to start laying or reach market weight. Mr. L. has been working diligently on designing chicken tractors that can hold 6 birds, that we can move here and there around the yard so the birds can have fresh forage without getting gotten by any of the fox, bobcat, hawks, or other critters we have roaming the area.
We have also decided that we want to raise meat rabbits. Mr. L. thinks it would be most economical to add a story to his chicken tractor build, and house one rabbit over top of each half dozen birds. My reading indicates that rabbits on the ground get laden with disease and/or parasites, and also that rabbit poop is actually nutritious for chickens, but that chicken poop can be really bad for rabbits, so if we want to house them together we should do so with the rabbit over the chickens. I’ll see if I can get him to sketch out his plans to share with y’all, and for sure I’ll take pictures when we start assembling them. He’s talking about a wooden coop/hutch on one end, with a roost and nest boxes for the chickens and a hidey-hole with a solid floor for the bunny, and the rest of the run be galvanized hardware cloth - 0.5”x0.5” for the bunny’s “floor”, and probably 1”x2” for the walls and the ceiling, with PVC supports so the danged thing is light enough for me to move! There are enough trees on the property that we can easily ensure that we park it in the shade during the summer months. I don’t know what he is planning for dimensions, but I do know that he tends to air on the side of “plenty of room”, since he frets about the chickens bullying each other. And if it will be big enough for 6 chickens, it will be plenty big enough for one bunny, or possibly even a momma bunny with kits. I know, if we start talking kits, we’ll need to do something different about the floor. Hooray - something to research!
As always I am keeping tabs on cost, etc. I will update you when we have purchased the materials. I know the 24 birds are going to run us $112 from https://www.mypetchicken.com because we always spring for the Marek’s vaccine. We haven’t lost a single chick yet - all of our losses have occurred once the birds were old enough to move outside. We decided on Jersey Giant and Buckeye, and we’ll pass on the Speckled Sussex for now - in spite of how pretty they are, they have a reputation for laying teeny-tiny eggs and making a royal ruckus about it.
As always, thank you for reading along with us, and your comments (below) are appreciated.