Welcome to the Urban Farm! Laura and Lindsey here will show you our chicken coop and show you our basic care for our chickens, ducks, and quail during this summer heat.
If you think that the world is headed in a direction that makes you a bit concerned for the future. And you’d like to be as self-sufficient and independent as possible, then you’ve come to the right place. My name is Lynette Zang. Now it’s time to go Beyond Gold and Silver.
We have a lot of different things going on here in the chicken coop, but one of the primary things you need to make sure to have is food. We have a couple different ways to feed the chickens.
This is a hanging feeder in which we keep our dry food in. We also have a bowl here of dry food. The benefit of the hanging feeder is they can’t kick around the food and make a mess like they do with the bowl.
Then we also do fermented feed, which is this. And we do this by just using the regular food and adding water to it and letting it soak in the sun. So fermented feed just gives them all of those healthy prebiotics and gut support and also hydration, which is really important, especially for the ducks. It makes it a little bit easier for them to eat
We also have several sources of Water. Here is a low bowl. This allows the chickens to stand in the water to cool off. Chickens keep cool in the summer by standing in water and cooling their feet. And then back here, we also have another dish for water. And then also we use the pond. The ducks and the chickens will drink directly from that basin. And then the ducks also will swim in the pond.
Another care for chickens is providing them areas for them to play eggs.
We have a box on the ground and look, there’s an egg in there right now. Chickens usually like to be secluded when they lay their egg. So that is a little dark spot for them. And the ducks also like to lay eggs in there, but chickens aren’t really too picky over here. You could see that they laid some eggs in just a random spot with some dirt.
So someone felt comfortable enough to lay their eggs right there. We also have a box in the back. These are our nesting boxes. It’s just another safe place for the chickens to go up into and lay their eggs back inside there.
So the original coop was started about 10 years ago. And since then it has gone under a few remodels. So most recently, two years ago we worked on just making it more secure. So adding the panel wood and just new wiring security was really important to us for wild animals. And also just making sure that our flock couldn’t get out.
This coop above is where we keep our meat chickens. When we grow some out. It just helps keep them separate. The meat chickens only grow for eight weeks and they eat a lot of food so they can get super heavy. So we keep them separate in here because we don’t want them to accidentally fall into the pond.
This is our quail coop. They live under here. We have several quail and they don’t require as much space and they are happy. As long as they’re out from underfoot of the chickens, we keep them separate just because they’re so small and they can also fall in the pond and the chickens will Peck at them. So just to keep everybody safe, we like to keep different things separated. We use the quail for quail eggs and also quail is an edible meat and they have a really fast grow time. So quick production of meat.
So it’s summer here in, and it’s a little challenging to try and keep the chickens. Cool. So one of the things we do is we have misters and these are on a timer. They’ll come on around 10:00 AM and every couple minutes they turn on and you kind of have ’em on intermittent time so that the ground doesn’t get soaking wet.
We also have a fan and that just circulates the air that helps with making things less stagnant and just giving them a little breeze. And then also the pond is really important for the ducks that helps them cool off. And just in general, making sure everybody has lots of water.
It’s also important for chickens to have something to stand in. They cool off through their feet. So oftentimes chickens. When you come in here, you’ll see a chicken standing right here, they’ll stand right there to cool off their feet, let the water run over their feet. And then we also have these low bowls that they stand in over there.
These are some of our favorite chickens. This is Nugget and this is Bobby and they want you to subscribe for more chicken content! We hope you enjoyed this tour video of us, where you got to learn how we keep our chickens.
