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It just so happens that in the countryside it is not a dog that is man’s best friend, but ordinary domestic chickens. The main life cycle of domestic chickens coincides with the period of active work in the country. There is enough space and food at the dacha, all that remains is to build a small summer chicken coop with your own hands in order to save and increase the chicken tribe until the fall.
How to organize a country life for a chicken
Rarely do any summer residents decide to seasonally keep a chicken breed without building a chicken coop. Even if during the summer period you fence part of the plot with chain-link and use the barn as a chicken coop, it will be very difficult to save the livestock. In addition to dietary meat and traditional eggs, chickens produce a sufficient amount of chicken droppings. Therefore, in order not to collect both products throughout the entire site, it is easier to make the simplest chicken coop in the country with your own hands.
Regardless of where and how to build a room for keeping chickens, a summer chicken coop must meet several basic requirements:
- The structure must be strong and rigid so that the weather or a small predator cannot cause the slightest harm to the bird.Chickens, like any domestic animal, easily succumb to panic and fear, so even in the summer version of the chicken coop there should be a durable room where you can hide;
- Any building for chickens should be planned as a chicken coop with a run. The opportunity to browse, rummage and bask in the sun is vital to good avian health;
- The summer version of the building for chickens should be easy to clean, disinfected with lime and promptly cleared of droppings.
You should not cover the summer version of the chicken coop with metal or corrugated sheeting. The expectation that the scorching rays of the sun will be able to disinfect the building is extremely incorrect. Most of the pathogenic microorganisms will not die, and chickens clearly do not like a building that is hot after a hot day. Even a summer chicken coop should be disinfected and cleaned at least once a week.
Most often, the size of a summer chicken coop is calculated according to the norm: four chickens per square square of the house area. The area of the pen for walking should be at least four times larger. A chicken coop for 5 chickens will take no more than 10 m2, taking into account 1.5 m2 for a perch, the same amount for a canopy with a vestibule, and the remaining 6-7 m2 suitable for walking, fenced with a net.
But in practice, most summer residents are racking their brains in search of a solution on how to make the size of the pen for summer walking in a chicken coop as large as possible without damaging the garden beds. The goal is simple - chickens, by their nature, should be active and able to graze on growing grass.
There are even designs for summer pens made in the form of tunnels from a chain-link mesh folded into half an arc, photo.The owners rearrange the tunnels throughout the site from time to time. Despite its unusual nature, with such a walking scheme, chickens have the opportunity to develop vitamin-rich vegetation and pasture without damaging the beds.
If eggs and meat are not intended for sale, it is better to abandon premixes and ready-made mixtures in favor of regular wheat, corn and what is available in the garden beds.
Materials for building a summer chicken coop
The summer version of the chicken coop is traditionally built from boards and slabs. Forget about any OSB, chipboard, fiberboard, plastic, and especially vulture panels. Firstly, assembling a summer cottage building from edged boards will cost much less, and secondly, the materials should not contain any resins and polymers that chickens can easily peck from the surface of the walls.
The second condition is the possibility of treating the inner surface of the walls of the summer chicken coop with lime and sanitary liquids. Wood will absorb 1.5-2 mm of solution, metal or OSB will not absorb anything at all, and lime will not even stick to plastic.
The best roofing for building a summer chicken coop is bitumen shingles. It does not rot, does not rattle under raindrops, and at the same time is strong enough to protect against martens or hawks.
In addition to boards, chain-link mesh is widely used to build a summer chicken coop. A pen is made from mesh, and the floor and basement parts of the summer building are reinforced to protect against rats and weasels.
Any external, that is, wooden parts of the building that are not immersed in the ground, are impregnated with antiseptics and whitewashed with lime mortar. Varnishes and paints on any basis are not welcome for placing a summer chicken coop.
Many summer residents, when solving the problem of how to make the construction of a chicken coop more durable, use fatty varieties of ordinary clay. A layer of material 1-2 cm thick can be whitened or painted with water-based emulsion. Coating or plastering a building with a mixture of fatty clay with horse manure and rye straw filler allows you to solve three problems at once:
- The mixture provides excellent preservation of the wooden frame of the building even without the use of toxic chemicals;
- Good sound and thermal insulation will provide a cool atmosphere inside the building in the heat and comfortable conditions even with slight frosts on the ground;
- The cost of such finishing will cost pennies, but if the technology is strictly followed, the plaster will last for at least ten years, and under the open sun it becomes stronger every year.
For a summer chicken coop, you can use a cosmetic version of plaster with a thickness of 5-6 mm. To prevent cracking of the protective layer, a painting mesh is used. This coating allows for normal protection of wood.
A similar mixture can be used to construct an adobe floor if the summer building will be located directly on the ground. To make an adobe base, you will need to remove the top layer of earth to a depth of 15 cm. Next, a thin layer of sand and crushed stone is poured onto the bottom, a protective mesh is laid, and the upper part is covered with fatty clay soaked in water, 4-5 cm thick.After some of the moisture has been absorbed by the sand, the layer is compacted with a wooden tamper. After each litter removal, the floor surface is wiped with liquid clay and lime, which has natural antiseptic properties.
The most interesting designs of summer chicken coops
Before you start searching for a drawing of a summer building that is suitable for the design, first of all, you need to decide on the main parameters - the size of the chicken coop and the number of chickens.
If you plan to build broiler chicken coop with your own hands, it is worth remembering that such a building is somewhat different from a room for ordinary chickens. Chicken coop for laying hens can be done with high springboards and parapets, perch poles are placed in increments of 45-50 cm to 1 m, nests can be built at a height of 70-90 cm. For broilers, the installation height of the poles is reduced to 30-40 cm, nests and feeders are installed directly on the floor or on a small podium. The reason is quite simple - broilers, with their large mass, have relatively weak bones, so falling from the perch often leads to serious injuries.
Summer chicken coop design for several chickens
The simplest version of a summer chicken coop can be built in one day, having at your disposal 12-14 m of wooden slats, 5 linear meters of metal mesh and 7 m2 plywood. The design of a summer building for chickens is shown in the drawing.
The general arrangement can be read in the figure below. The summer building is made in the form of a symmetrical gable structure, the upper part of which is covered with plywood and reserved for the house. At a height of 70 cm, a floor is sewn, which also serves as a ceiling for the lower compartment.
The dimensions of the base of the summer chicken coop are 153x244 cm, providing normal walking and housing for 5-6 chickens. The frame of the building is made of wooden slats or timber; a ventilation hole and a hatch are cut out in the upper part of the summer chicken coop, allowing you to open the house and remove laid eggs, clean, add food and water to the feeder and drinking bowl.
The cross-section of the summer building is an isosceles triangle. Each of the slopes is made according to the above drawing. Initially, longitudinal joists are cut out, the ends are cut at an angle of 60O and 30O respectively. Transverse boards are sewn onto the logs, onto which plywood will be stuffed and a protective mesh will be stretched. After assembly, using a drawing of the external frame, a floor is filled inside from sections and remnants of edged boards, on which it is advisable to lay a steel sheet so that the droppings remain inside the building and do not spill out when being collected on the chickens’ heads.
After assembly, wooden slats can be treated with an antiseptic and the surface should be thoroughly rinsed with water. The internal surfaces of the building must be treated with lime.
The design does not provide for a floor on the lower level, which, in fact, fits into the idea of using a summer chicken coop. Every two to three days the building is moved to a new place with clean grass, thereby eliminating the need to clean the pen for walking the birds.
This design of a summer chicken coop is perfect for the first attempts at breeding birds, since a house for 5 chickens for a summer house is still not enough to provide for an ordinary family of three or four people. As you gain practical experience in caring for chickens, you can choose a more practical full-size version of the summer chicken coop.
Country version of a summer chicken coop for 10 laying hens
The above design of a summer chicken coop is made on a light foundation of stone and brick, laid on a sand-filled area. The chicken house is built according to the classic frame scheme from timber and 20 mm edged boards. Such a chicken coop can no longer be moved around the site, so the location for the summer building must be determined once, preferably under a tree.
The highlight of the project is the canopy over the summer pen for walking chickens. Cellular polycarbonate is used as the roofing material, and the canopy supports are used as pillars for the protective mesh.
The floor in the summer paddock is sandy with the addition of pebbles and ash. Periodically, the sand base has to be removed and replaced with a new layer. The low location of the entrance hatch allows you to use the chicken coop for breeding almost any breed of chicken, and the spacious premises of the summer house can accommodate 10 - 20 broilers or 30 laying hens.
Conclusion
Stationary summer chicken coops built from boards and timber can be considered the most rational for raising chickens in a summer cottage. Without insulation, the premises are able to winter normally without loss of structural qualities. At the beginning of the season, it is enough to carry out sanitary treatment against insects and mice, and a batch of young animals can be moved into the chicken coop.
