We did it, in under an hour ... well we've had lots of practise, this is the fourth time we've put one of these together :-)
This is the Maggies 24 henhouse from Flyte So Fancy, and our absolute favorite type of henhouse. They are easy to get inside for cleaning, perfectly designed for the chickens and hold 24 of our kind of birds perfectly well, as we have a mix of full sized birds and bantams.
I say this because when we were registered free range egg sellers (we decided to register when our birds numbers got near to 50 at our first farm) the Inspector came out and did all the measurements of land available for the hens, space in the house and the number of nest boxes to ensure we met all the requirements and these houses came in at being 'official' for 22 full sized birds to live in and the four nesting boxes meant they were suitable for 40 birds to lay in. I remember at the time imagining the queue of ten birds for each nesting box!!
We decided to get this additional henhouse and to make a new Chicken World on the hillside so that after the wet winter we have just come through we can rest and reconfigure our usual Chicken World to make it more suitable for the birds and safer for us in any future wet Welsh winters ... and I'm sure we're going to have some ;-)
This second living area has already been nicknamed Chicken Land although this may change in future when the fruit trees are a bit bigger to simply The Orchard, at the moment with the trees being so young it just doesn't feel like an Orchard.
Lovely Hubby is currently still out there putting the wire on the fence posts and making the whole area safer for the birds. This second chicken world will be used whenever we need to rest the other one and can also be pulled into use if we need to segregate birds for any reason, for example if we have cockerels in future that we needed to grow on ready for meat use, and they were getting to an age where they started picking on little Jack. Hatching out your own chicks does mean that you end up with boys as well as girls and I am of the opinion that boys deserve a happy life as well as the girls, even if it is shorter.
Not for me the practice of mincing day old chicks just becasue they are boys .... once you've seen that video clip you really can't get it out of your head can you :-(
Sue xx
