Cleaning the chicken coop is about the last chore on my fall To Do List. Rafe came in to help when I was about done. I wore a handkerchief over my mouth to cut the dust, but I still ended up with a hacking cough the rest of the day.
This chore brings back memories of cleaning the old building on my parents’ farm where I kept my 4-H pigs.
(And yes, maybe my dad did send me out there in the dark one night when he found out I hadn’t checked on my pigs in a day or three and maybe I did go tearing back to the house screaming and making my parents think I’d been attached by a wild animal when my flashlight beamed across a nightcrawler, of which I was deathly afraid.)
Which always makes me think of Lisa, my best friend growing up. She was a “town kid”, but somehow I managed to rope her into helping me scoop poop and wash my pigs for the fair. (Hi, Lisa!) I know she reads this from Waverly, which is far enough away that I can’t rope her into much of anything anymore.
Anyhoo.
We scrape the chicken coop down to the floorboards, haul the old bedding off to compost, and start over with fresh wood shavings on the floor and clean straw in the nest boxes. Through the winter we’ll keep adding layers of wood shavings. Lather, rinse, repeat next year.
Don’t these nest boxes, with their fresh golden straw, just say, “Come, lay an egg in me.”?
Today’s grand egg total? Two. Last time I counted we had close to sixty hens.
Slackers.
There’s Miss Silkie in the picture. People always ask me if we still have her.
The next task will be to catch as many of the hens as we can that are roosting outside of the coop, and shut them up inside the coop for a few days to help them remember where they’re supposed to make their egg deposits.
those nest boxes do look cozy. what’s the deal with the slacker chickens? if our girls slacked off like that heads would roll. we have eight hens and usually get seven eggs. never less than five per day, even in the deepest dark of last winter. although we are expecting a molt soon we’ll see what happens then. i’m going to find some wood to knock on after that last bold statement.
Good plan!! Them chickens are laying someplace and probably providing some skunk with a nice fresh snack..
My hens are slackers too. Either that or they’ve taken to laying out in the woods somewhere. Zero eggs per day from 6 hens. Maybe they’re just taking the winter off…?
my egg count for 5 hens…..zero…Nice boxes….
I have two rhode island red pullets that reached laying age one month ago. So far, only one of them has taken one day off. Otherwise, we get an egg per day out of each of them.By the by, I have been reading your blog for months, and I am absolutely ecstatic. You are living life in a state that my wife and I aspire to reach, and I don’t mean the State of Iowa. We have started with a couple of free-range egg-layers, but we are green to the ways of farming. I would be very interested in learning more about the details of your chicken operation.