The “Garden Girl,” that is:
That looks like a pretty simple, clean design to me.
Over the last few months, we’ve had some serious problems with losing chickens. Something evil is sneaking in at night, tearing birds out of their coop, then shredding their corpses in the woods.
Either we have a possum/coon problem, or I need to talk with an exorcist. Whatever the problem is (assuming it’s not a malevolent spirit), I’m thinking hardware cloth tractors would be a good upgrade on my current system. Basically, if I forget to lock them in at night, I lose them. Since I’m absent minded, this happens. And then I have guilt. I hate that.
One thing I would modify in Patti’s design is the roofing. Tarps don’t last all that long, even though they’re cheap and light. Something like this would be better long-term.
A lot of chicken lovers will tell you that free-ranging is the best for birds. Yet that method has a few problems.
1. It ticks off your neighbors
2. It can doom your garden
3. Birds disappear
4. Chickens will poop all over your porch/furniture/bicycle/tools/EVERY FREAKING THING
I don’t like these things to happen on my homestead, so I’ve gone back and forth between putting them out in makeshift tractors and letting them stay in a traditional coop with a chicken yard. I wish they could get more forage, but they can’t without me either putting in a lot more work or running the risk of problems 1-4 above.
There is a plan I have in mind as the chicken tractor/garden bed rotation design to end all chicken tractor/garden bed designs… but I need to actually go to the effort of building it. Maybe when the temperatures leave the 90s.
If I pull it off, I’ll share the plans with you. Until then, it’d be hard to go wrong with Garden Girl’s method.
Stay tuned.
The post Building a Chicken Tractor: So Easy a Girl Can Do It appeared first on .