Winterizing the Chicken Coop

Q: Why would our chickens' water fount be in the kitchen sink?


A: Because it's frozen. 

December came in with a touch of snow, which made for a fun trek to the Christmas tree farm yesterday:


It was pretty, but it was cold. When we got home with the tree, we realized the temperature for the day hadn't climbed out of the 20s. When Kirk looked in on the chickens, he realized that their water had frozen over, so we had to bring it in the house to chip out the ice and refill it.

Time to winterize the coop. About a month ago we picked up a warmer for the water:


For a quick fix last night, we ran an extension cord from the garage to the coop, but today Kirk worked up some permanent wiring:


He dug a trench (lucky me – I got to fill it back in!) and ran a wire underground from the workshop to the run:


From the run the wire goes up through the eave, along the ceiling of the run, and on into the henhouse. Kirk set up an outlet on the wall to plug the warmer into:


We'll keep an eye on the cord to check whether or not the hens peck at it. If so, we'll need to protect that cord and tack it down to wall more carefully. The warmer has a thermostat, so it only comes on when the temperatures fall below 35 degrees. It should be just enough to keep the water liquid and drinkable for them. 

They also have a 40-watt bulb that we've been using, increasing the amount of light each day to try to coax them into laying some winter eggs. They're up to about 16 hours of "daylight" now, but we have yet to see any results with this method. If nothing else, the warming tray and bulb will offer the ladies a few extra degrees of warmth, I guess.

In the meantime, we had to add eggs to the grocery list this week. Sigh.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What to Do With an Unripe Watermelon

Image
Back on the first weekend of August we were so excited to see how big our watermelons were getting. We checked all the signs of ripeness: good sound, firm skin, yellow bottom. So Kirk brought one in: And we sliced it open: Shit. This is not meant to be a yellow watermelon. It only even looks that way in the photo because of the lighting — it's really white throughout. It's Sweet Favorite, and it's supposed to be red.  After the huge wave of disappointment rolled through the room, we all took a bite anyway.  It's not sweet, but it's not sour or bitter, either. It tastes like watermelon, just without the sugar. Kind of like a watermelon-flavored cucumber. It's too big to let go to waste, and we felt obligated to wrap it up and keep it in the fridge until we figured out something to with it.   Dish #1: Watermelon Kachumber Kachumber is an Indian salad that is normally made with cucumber. Here we used some of our unripe w
Read more

Last Weekend of Winter

Image
It's the last weekend of winter! Next weekend we'll be beyond the equinox, and the days will be ever-so-slightly longer than the nights.  We still have snow on the ground, lots of wind, and temperatures in the 30s, but we plowed ahead with our almost-spring garden chores anyway. Here's what we did this weekend: 1. Got the chickens out on the raised bed where to prep the soil for planting greens: 2. Poked around the greenhouse tunnels to harvest the last veggies: parsnips and a couple leeks, plus a few leftover fall cabbages for the chickens (which they were very  excited about). We do still have some spinach, mache and kale left as well, but not much. 3. Improved the maple sugaring set-up by building a bigger firebox: Kirk used leftover bricks we had lying around to make a floor (so as not to ruin the bricks on our patio), then got nine cinderblocks to make the three walls of the firebox (solid side toward the fire). He also picked up some steel
Read more

So Where's Everybody From?

Image
I don't have any new garden pictures or updates for you today. I have to say, it's getting kind of hard to get a good photo during the one hour of waning daylight left by the time I get home from work. These are the darkest days now, as we hurtle toward the solstice. Without any photos for me to share with you today, I thought it would be a good time to ask: Where're y'all from? If you have never kept a blog of your own, you might not know that the writer of one gets a bunch of stats about who has hit on the webpage. Most of it's not very interesting: I don't care how many of you use your iPhone vs. a PC or what browser you use to surf the web. The one interesting part, though, is the map . Blogger keeps track of what country readers are in when they check out my page. It's fascinating! Here's my readership map for November: I figured my readers were mostly my Facebook friends, and I know where they are. But now my list of countries is gettin
Read more