New Chicken Run

As I mentioned previously, the new chicken run is being made by refurbishing an old disintegrating structure. The structure used to be a wall built around an aboveground swimming pool. When we moved into the property, the pool was gone except for some torn and shredded bits of pool lining. The structure itself consists of two walls of colour bond steel attached to steel posts. The other two boundaries of the structure were simply steel posts set into concrete. Overall, the area is about 6m x 10m.

To turn this into a chicken run, I needed to weld a supporting frame between the steel posts to support a low colour bond wall. The colour bond wall will reduce the wind flow into the chicken run and also reduce the access to the chicken run to unwanted animal visitors such as snakes and rats.

From above the colour bond wall to the top of the steel posts, I’ll be putting up chicken wire. The chicken wire will also cover the top of the run. The entire run will be enclosed to protect the chickens from some of our winged predators (wedge tailed eagles, common brown hawks and other birds of prey).

So far I have almost completed welding the supporting frame in place and I have clad 2/3rds of the colour bond wall in place.

Goat Shelter

The goat shelter that I built is a very simple structure. This was constructed by building a pair of square frames 1.4m x 1.4m from DAR framing timber. The frames were then connected with a further four 1.4m pieces of framing timber. Resulting in the construction of a 1.4 x 1.4 x 1.4 m cube. The roof and floor of the structure were reinforced with an additional piece of framing timber.

A roof was made by nailing fence 1.8m long palings in two overlapping layers. The roof, then, is a fairly waterproof structure that overlaps the shelter by 20 cm all the way around.

Similarly, a single layer of 1.4m fence palings made a floor.

Three walls were enclosed with 1.4m long pieces of fence paling. An area of approximately 15cm was left uncovered underneath the eves of the shelter to provide ventilation.

The shelter was then mounted on about 20cm of cement blocks to keep the timber structure above the ground and (hopefully) reduce the likelihood of rot and extend the life of the shelter.

Our Chooks

We have been keeping chickens at our property since 2006 and I think that chickens are the best and easiest way to introduce anyone to modest self sufficiency. They are great. Food goes in and eggs and compost comes out.
Our first foray into the lives of chook owners was a pair of Old English Game hens, Cleopatra and Boudicca (left). These were very flighty birds who didn’t like us much. Also they weren’t very good layers.

We added four Isa Brown hens to the chook pen and started getting eggs! Woohoo!
The Isa’s were great, except that they were not very robust. I’ve since learned that the main reason that my Isa Browns were not very long lived was that they were “rescued” from a poultry farm where they were given lots of medications to keep them free from disease while they were kept in batteries. This means that when the chickens were liberated, they were more susceptible to diseases because they had never developed a natural immunity to them.
Our Isa Browns laid very large eggs (on average the eggs were 70-90 grams) and we got five eggs every two days.
Cleopatra started to get very broody and would sit on the Isa eggs and not leave the nesting box to eat or drink. To solve this, I attached a food and water dish to the nesting box that she used and made sure that she left the nest at least once a day.
We decided that it was time to get rid of the OEG hens. Our neighbour took Cleopatra to use as a broody hen for his chickens (none of which were broody at all) and Boudicca would be re-homed to the kitchen.
I was quite reluctant to kill and clean a chicken, but I figured that if I was going to keep chickens, then I had to accept that some of these animals were going to end up on my table, and that I would be the one who would have to do it. If I learned how to do this properly, then there was little risk that either I or the chicken in question would suffer.
Suffice to say, that I believe that I can now dispatch a chicken and prepare it for the table without causing the chicken or the rest of the flock any distress.
Our Isa Browns were also very fond of the plum tree (you can see the plum tree in the picture to the right). When the plums were dropping from the tree, the chooks would eat as many as they could stuff into their crop. Unfortunately, these had a tendency to ferment in the birds’ crop. I had one embarrassing experience taking a chook to the vet only to have the vet tell me that the chook was drunk!
The Isa Browns didn’t live very long; unfortunately, they were all gone by the end of 2009. Now I have four White Leghorn hens and a Rhode Island Red rooster, Raj.
The White Leghorns are prolific layers and they seem to be very satisfied with their rooster. Raj is also very happy with the hens. We have produced one clutch of four chicks from the chickens as an experiment in incubation. The chicks from the first clutch are now happily living at a friends’ property in Collinsvale, Tasmania. Another seven eggs are currently in the incubator and are due to hatch this weekend!
To accommodate our growing brood of birds, I am converting a badly neglected outbuilding into a new chicken run for the hens and the old run will be a bachelor pad for the males. Raj will be the only breeding male so we won’t have to worry about testosterone driven fowl murder.
Read the article below about the conversion of the outbuilding.

Introducing Millie and Molly

Millie and Molly are our two new doe kids. We got these two goats from Burnie in Tasmania’s North from a lovely lady who had rescued a number of kids from a friend who normally puts excess goats down.
These two girls will form the core of our goat flock and we are hoping to use the goats for both milk and as a weed eradication approach.
Goats are very fond of new plant growth and have been shown to be very effective for weed eradication as they eat the flowers and fruit of weed plants. This means that the weed lifecycle is stopped before they can spread. Of course, this means that we will still have the old growth weeds in the top paddock, but new weeds will be less prevalent.
Our top paddock has loads of weeds such as wild radish, thistle, blackberry and flat-weeds. I’ve tried using the ride-on mower, but it is on the side of a hill and it’s too steep to do so safely. The weeds and grass need to be kept down as this is a bushfire risk for our property and for our neighbours.

The girls will be just 6 weeks old when we pick them up, so they will need to be inoculated with CD-T to prevent tetanus and overeating disorder. They will also still be on milk formula for a while yet, so I am very grateful that the lady who is giving these girls away is also providing enough formula to get them past weening.
To prepare the property for the goats, I had to make a shelter and I will need to improve the fence in the area where they will be kept. Initially, the goats will be kept in a smallish area of around 360²m. The fence between our property and our neighbour is pretty old and in poor repair, so I need to replace this with dog mesh fence. The length of fence needed is about 32m and I will need to replace the fence posts as well. Fortunately, I have a couple of tree lengths left over from a previous project, so I can cut these to size to make the sturdy fence posts that I will need.
I have also constructed a pretty basic shelter for the goats from pine framing timber and fence palings (see the Goat Shelter section for more information on construction).