Coop Swap!!

We've recently swapped coops!  Here is what our old chicken coop looked like, we used five gallon buckets as the laying nests for convenience and ease of cleaning. The chickens seemed to like them too!

You can see the wall on the back of the coop was painted by Martha, trying to use up some old house paints. I think that the chickens enjoyed the murals, maybe we can do it again in the new space this spring!

However, our flock has grown and we are anticipating it continuing to grow during this summer. So, we've re-worked our horse stalls as part of the overall barn remodel to become the new coop for our laying hens, turkeys, and guinea hen. You can see the direct access that the birds have outside through the small doors in the barn wall. We close these up every night to keep them safe from outside predators.

You can see some different nesting boxes on the walls in this picture. We still used the five gallon buckets for other nesting boxes and those are located along the opposite wall to these boxes.

 The new coop is four times the size of the old one which really gives the birds some more room to move around. We tried to make the transition between coops as low stress as possible, but unfortunately right after the initial swap, our egg production dropped down to a mere few eggs a day.  We were worried about this drop and started trying to figure out how to increase the egg production in other ways. Luckily all that the chickens seemed to need was time. After having two or three weeks to become accustomed to the new space, the eggs are booming! We get about two and a half to three dozen fresh eggs a day!

Here are the chickens enjoying their new space!