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This is an old goat house that was on the property when we bought it. One of the boys who used to live here had a goat for awhile.
We used it first for our main chicken coop. We started with 4 chickens as I wasn’t sure whether I would like having them.
I had zero experience with raising chickens and starting with small numbers would allow us to ease into raising farm animals.
Turns out, we loved having chickens and every year we kept getting more and more.
We worked on getting a proper hen house down at the barn and once we did, we moved all the girls in there.
A few year later, we had 17 hens and were getting about 9 eggs a day. Some of the hens were 3 years old and we weren’t sure who was laying and who was enjoying a free ride in the Valley.
While we enjoy raising animals, we feel they have to pull their own weight, so to speak. So if some hens weren’t laying at all we needed to figure that out and dispatch the free loaders.
So, I moved the hens in two at a time over to the small goat house, in an attempt to find out who was laying and who was not.
I’ve read you can check the hens vents to see if they are nice and pink and those should be the ones laying. I couldn’t figure it out, they all looked pretty good and yet, still only about 7 or 8 eggs a day. So I started using the other coop for housing.
And it worked. It took awhile, but we found out that only 9 hens were laying consistently. So, we culled the rest and used their meat for dog food for da Wolf.
We had set up temporary fencing around the goat house, so the hens in exile could run around outside during the day.
Once we figured out who wasn’t laying and dispatched them, it was time to take down the fencing.
We can’t leave temporary fencing up over winter. Since we use a lot of chicken wire in the fencing (because it’s lightweight so I can easily move it around myself) the winter snows would just crush it.
So, at the end of the season, I have to take down all the chicken run fencing that ran around the temporary coop.
Got it all bundled up and put it up in the barn loft until it’s needed again.
I left these wires on the fence down at the Animal Garden, so I can find them next year, in case I need to set up again.
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