Monday, August 7, 2017

Cooperation

One part of my plans is adding a chicken coop in the farthest south-west corner. That corner is not much use for anything else, due to its shape and placement, plus it is as far away from the neighbors I can get, so chickens will bother them the least there.
But but, having thought about several different coop designs in the last couple of weeks, it seems more difficult than I anticipated.

Cut and zoomed from THE MAP
The corner area has three relatively young spruce trees along the high fence on south, and a pine tree for some reason in the middle of it, with my stupid kiwi sapling (transplanted for the 3rd time thanks to our moving to a new home, poor thing it is a wonder it is not dead) also in the middle of things, and a big nice bush of some sort in it. And then there are two big old tree trunks, protecting the drop, and I discovered another tree on the west edge which was being out-competed by weeds, which I cut the weeds around, and it seems to be recovering. Hopefully it will help stabilize the ground an a few years. All the above are very natural and green and shit but I cannot keep them all if I want to put a coop and a run there.

First I thought I should have a coop placed in the corner, with the rest of the area being a big open run.
Wide open
But it is probably not a good idea, as that area is not properly fenced (due to "the drop", it only has netting separating it from the neighboring land), it is also not protected with a roof or anything. So predators and birds probably will get to the chickens.
My revised option was to have that area as a big open run, but only on weekends. I would make a smaller more permanent run with proper fencing within that area attached with coop.
So, rotating and moving my imaginary coop around the area, I came up with this plan, which only requires cutting down 2 spruces, but saves the rest including the kiwi and the unknown bush which I think the chickens would appreciate both for its shade and for the way it attracts insects.
Half open
This is pretty good. The combined coop and run is big enough for up to 6 birds, it provides good shelter and access to nature etc etc. But there are a couple of issues...
Placing the coop there is a waste of good stable fence behind it. But that is not a huge problem. The problem is that the ground in that area is pretty much level to the right of the pine, but it slopes down quite a bit to the left of the pine, and the slope comes round and also includes the bottom (north) part of the bush.
If anything I am starting to get better at drawing with mouse
So, it means the elevated coop with run attached to it has to be built to be placed on uneven surface. Perhaps by having longer legs on the bush side or sumpting. But the ground north of the slope and north of the bush and the netting is not exactly stable... meaning it may slide down someday maybe due to big rain, earthquake or something of that nature, and whatever is built on it would also slide down... such a slide would probably tear the coop apart if it is build in one piece.
Back to the drawing table.

One thing I can do is to separate coop and run so that their structures are not attached. Also I want to take advantage of the southern fence as part of the run. Doing that means I can probably keep most of the trees. How about I get rid of the unknown bush only, and replace it with a coop?
This is where I am now
Maybe I will come up with more issues that makes this plan useless too. But for now this is where I am. I will be measuring more and check the levelness and hopefully this will be the final plan.
What I like about this one is that it excludes the drop, gets around the slope problem, keeps the trees, plus if designed correctly it will allow access to nest boxes from outside

No comments:

Post a Comment