One of the main reasons my husband was interested in our house here in Hattiesburg was that it had a chicken coop outside. We have talked about getting chickens since we first knew that we were getting this house back in March. Then, there was all the moving and unpacking and getting adjusted. My husband had to go back to finish his contract in Kansas for a few weeks, and didn’t get back down in Mississippi until July 5. We had a beach trip and traveled back-and-forth to visit family in Louisiana.
Now the time has come where we were ready to start planning for chickens. For several days, I spent hours on research, looking into different types of chickens, chicken houses, feed, light sources, chicks, etc. we decided after looking at nearly a hundred coops that will build a simple house with an exterior nesting box. This will go inside our coop that we already have. The coop is just stilts with the chicken wire around it attached to a barn. We also need a door to close the coop and maybe more chicken wire to double the protection at the bottom.
I’ve looked at different plans to try not to make it too fancy, but just comfortable enough of the chickens will use it and have a safe place. I have an Excel spreadsheet to figure out the price of what we need to make a little chicken coop with a nesting box. It’s going to run us about $350-$400. And that’s for a simple 4 x 4 x 4 box with the roof. We aren’t locus enough to have wood laying around, and will need to buy most of it. I looked into getting put together plastic ones, but they were so many people who said that they wouldn’t last or they were broken coming in, and having enough experience of things we received in the mail being broken, I decided it was probably better just to go from scratch and pay the same amount of money, but get exactly how we want.
So then we went and bought some chickens! We aren’t really sure what these five babies are, except that one of them is different than the others. I’m thinking the yellow and black one is a black Australop, and the four dark ones are Mystic Onyx. We won’t know for sure until they get bigger. Three of them have 5 toes, which I know are descendants of specific types. The Mystic Onyx come from Silkies, which do have 5 toes. We don’t even know if they’re female or male yet. The kids have already grown attached to them and giving them names, Clucky, Fluffy, LeDoux, Fancy, Aloysius. That was my husband’s name choice He’s always wanted to name something Aloysius.
I didn’t know that we were going to be starting with chicks. I kind of hoped to ago straight to chickens, but to get a full grown chicken is nearly $30 apiece. Whereas a chick is only about 3 to 4 dollars apiece. So we had to add researching a chicken brood quickly, as you can see in the picture it is just a plastic swimming pool from Walmart for five dollars. We had cardboard boxes that I could to put around the outside, and taped together with duct tape. We just got pine shavings for the bottom of the pool, and I found some feed and water containers from tractor supply. We got the heat lamp for the brooder from Tractor Supply, but since we have them in the sunroom of our house, we don’t really need it in the daytime. It stays about 91° in here without any extra lights. Last night as our first night being chicken guardians, we worked a while trying to figure out where to put the lamp to give the chicks enough warmth but not catch the box on fire. With that lamp on, at 5 o’clock, you’re still getting 103°. So we didn’t turn it on till nearly 8 o’clock last night. I got up every two hours last night coming to check on them to make sure the temperature was right. At midnight it is solid about 90, so I push the chair a little bit closer.
Have you ever seen a baby chick sleep? It looks like they are dead. Splat out on the ground. Almost like when a toddler is so tired they just lay out and fall asleep with her little butt in the air. The chicks looked comfortable in the light, they were still huddled together as if they were a little chilly. Still not sure if I like it enough to keep doing this every night, so I ordered a heat source online, called the EcoGlow20. It should be here Friday, and we’ll see if we like that one better or not. It seems you just plug it in and put the heat source in the router, and there’s no light to worry about. Is our journey continues, I will update the block so we can look back later and laugh at ourselves for getting these little creatures.
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