Making a house a home....

I've been asked what kind of housing we have for our chickens, so I thought today I'd share with you.
I should add the beginning of the school holidays marks the BIG clean up of the cadges, so don't mind the mess. We give the cadges all a REALLY big clean each school holidays, in between we do small clean ups, lime and re-straw as needed and depending on weather. I'll soon blog our cleaning day :)

 We wanted chickens for eggs and didn't want to spend alot of money on fancy housing. To us spending alot of money on housing didn't matter to the chickens, they just want somewhere safe, warm and dry to live and we wanted fresh cheap eggs. Spending hundreds of dollars on housing defeated that purpose. All our housing has been second hand and either free or cheap, from ebay, free cycle or facebook.

This is the first cadge we started with, we put in a perch for them to roost on and an old set of cupboards we pulled out of the house as a nesting box.

This nesting box is still one of the favourites with 4-6 eggs layed in it most days.

This is the second cadge we bought when we got the bantams. It's similar to the first cadge, we didn't have a nesting box set up as the bantams weren't laying till a few months ago, however they found their own special place to lay their eggs. This second cadge now houses the four black hens, they only in the last few afternoons have started mixing with the bantams.

The bantams like laying in the lawn mower catcher.

Our third cadge we only bought two months ago and since having it has become the safe haven for mums and bubs and those sitting waiting to become mums.Its a bit overgrown cause we don't want to disturb the sitting mum and with all the rain the grass has taken off like MAD!!

You can see there is a small green cadge and a compost bin in this cadge.

 If you look you can see mum doing her duty sitting on the eggs, just another 8 days to go, chicken eggs take 21days to hatch.

We do have a few smaller cadges we use for various stages, this bird cadge we had the black hens in when they were still needing to be heated inside and now houses mum and 2 chicks. 

This cadge is and old rabbit hutch, it was a freebie on the curbside collection. It houses mum and one chick at the moment. 

As the chicks grow and needs change we will swap them around. 

 We fenced off a section in front of the 2 main houses, this means we can let them out of their cadges without having to let them into the main yard. This comes in handy when having friends over and having food outside, chickens love helping them self to a table of food and don't mind who is watching!! We also dog sit from time to time and the dog loves the chickens....to death :(    He will chase them and play with them till they die...a bit like a cat with a mouse I guess.

 For the most part our chickens free range in the yard, our grass has never looked so good and we have next to no weeds, they even eat the dog poo so no pooper scooping needed BONUS!!

Look has much the chick has grown...

Newborn

first feathers coming in

3weeks old

Almost 4 weeks old

 aus.keeys