Moving the Chickens Outside

Time passed, the chicks grew, and we had to expand to a second cardboard box. Finally, we removed everything movable from the utility room and built a chicken-wire wall, complete with door, and turned half the room over to the them. We lined the walls and floor with a blue tarp, and put branches collected from outside through the wire and across the room to make perches.

Finally, we cleared out the back half of the pool house, a fairly spacious outbuilding, made another chicken-wire wall, and moved the chickens out to their new home. The final building project was fencing in a chicken run along the back of our fenced-in swimming pool.

Happy chickens! At about five months (that is, early July), we found the first egg, about half the size of a regular grocery store egg. (Chickens start small and work up.) We put up a row of nest boxes (left over from our previous chicken set-up), and put a golf ball in each one. Chickens can't tell an egg from a golf ball, so when they see a golf ball in a nest, they figure that this must be where eggs go, and they lay there. By early August, we were getting 8-10 eggs a day, and pestering out friends to take them. Once they got to a more normal size, we signed up as an egg vendor with the local food co-op, and starting selling them a couple dozen eggs every week or so. But it's more fun to give them away.