Dan’s review of The Garden Coop plans

I did a lot of research before I built my chicken coop, and this is by far one of the best sets of coop plans out there. I went back and forth on trying to create my own plan until I found your site. The plans are worth every bit of the price (if not a lot more).

Overall, I stuck pretty close to The Garden Coop design. I was still able to put my own creativity into it and make it my own, but the plans saved me hours of work by giving me the basic design, supplies, and easy steps to follow. It is such a great plan, but also allows for basic modifications.

The coop did cost a little more than I budgeted for. I had a $500 start, but honestly probably hit closer to $1,000 after all was said and done, including modifications. I also took my time building it. Probably two months in all. We would bring out tools, music, and work together as a family. The memories and experience — priceless.

Extra features and design touches

Here are some of the things we did to personalize our backyard coop:

1. Cantilevered extended roof. We really like this addition to the design. It gives a “garage” to store our urban farm accessories. We keep four cans under here: one for wood shavings, one for chicken feed/scratch, one for our rabbit food, one for our bird feed. I also hang our basic tools and have two Lowes buckets for cleaning. With the extended roof, you really have to create temporary braces before putting on the hardware cloth due to the extra weight and extension of the roof. It also adds costs to the overall plan, but it worked well for us.
2. Hen house ramp to side. This looks to be one of the most popular options. I like it because it allows more room inside the hen house, and I get to see my “girls” walk up the ramp from my kitchen window.
3. Roofing material. We have a few Lowes stores in the Raleigh area, and I could only find this at one of the stores. It is called Ondura. They have a really cool red color, and I liked how it looked on the coop.
4. Decorative window. I saw this and knew I had to have it on my coop. I picked it up at Market Imports in Raleigh, NC. We thought about an old stain glass window, but in the end this was more durable and easier to install.
5. T-11 siding. I liked the vertical lines of the T-11 siding, and due to the thickness, I didn’t put in the interior floating wall called for in the plans. I just put T-11 around the whole thing. It is a little heavier, and you really need two people for helping with this one.
6. Side-swinging egg door. I first built a door that raised up to access the internal nest boxes I built, but the cabinet hinge I used was not kid-friendly. I switched it back to the side (as in the plans), and it has been much easier for my kids to open.
7. Rear access door. I put a rear access door on the back of the hen house so that I don’t have to go into the coop to access the hen house. It gives me an extra option for cleaning and for adding wood shavings to the hen house.
8. Bench. I put in a homemade bench directly in front of the coop. This has been great. I go out early in the morning before kids are up to drink my coffee and watch my “girls.” Great way to start my day.
9. Rain barrel wash station. My hose didn’t quite reach to the coop, and adding two hoses was too hard for my kids to pull all the way to the coop, so I built a rain barrel wash station. I took four cinder blocks, put leftover T-11 siding around it, added a platform, put a frame in front with pressure treated 2×4s, and connected with two-foot rebar to put it together. I like how it looks with the coop, and it is easy to wash your hands after working with the coop and to fill our waterer. I haven’t built the gutter yet, so currently I am just filling the barrel with the hose.
10. Metal decorative roosters. Again, another Market Imports find. I saw these three years ago and knew I wanted them in my garden. I had know idea I would ever have backyard chickens! I mounted two of them on a 6X12 piece of pressure treated wood I stained. I have one on each side of the roof “protecting my girls.”

Again, what a great experience for me and my family building the coop. Thanks for great plans and a great site. It has been fun to see others across the nation and world being part of the “Garden Coop Club.” —Dan, Jessica, Ethan, Olivia, Adam, and Aaron in Raleigh, North Carolina

Many thanks to Dan and his family for sharing their pictures and ideas. If you like what they’ve done. Let them know with a comment below. And check out this post on Dan’s blog (Dan The Can Do Man) for more about their backyard chicken adventures. Finally, subscribe to Coop Thoughts. It’s free, ad-free, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Gardener, suburban homesteader, chef, and author of the blog Northwest Edible Life, Erica S. is also the proud keeper of a flock of backyard chickens. And the coop she built to house them (based on The Garden Coop plans) has become a key part of her food garden.

Erica sent a note about her coop/modifications as well as links to some great posts on her ongoing experimentation — both with the coop in particular and with sustainable suburban living in general:

Just wanted to let you know we bought your plans last year and based our coop off of them. We love the look and functionality. Thanks for the excellent design.

The biggest changes we made are: the size (slightly larger at 12′ x 8′), running the ramp up the side entrance of the hen house, fully looping hardware mesh under the coop, and the way we attached the mesh on the roof. . .

We made framed panels of mesh and attached these to the roof joists with screws. I think this way of doing it, rather than all that stapling overhead, streamlined things quite a bit, and the extra materials cost was trivial.

Of course, we’ve been making periodic improvements as we’ve gone along (next up: chicken nipple waterer!). You can see what we’ve done here, here, and here.

Thanks again for the great plans!

Many thanks to Erica for sharing her tips and photo. Like what she’s done? Leave a comment here or on her blog. And be sure to check out Northwest Edible Life for even more inspiring ideas.

This extra-spacious chicken coop was built by a volunteer from the Becker school community using plans from TheGardenCoop.com and materials purchased with a grant. He modified the design to about double the size, allowing plenty of room for the school’s current flock of thirteen.

According to Cheris, a Becker parent (and chicken keeper herself), the chickens have enhanced just about every part of the curriculum. “We also work in conjunction with The Green Classroom across the street,” Cheris says, “so the kids go to the garden, pick weeds, and bring them over here to feed the chickens. It has been a great experience.”

Kudos to everyone who got this project up and has kept it running. What do you think of the idea of raising chickens and vegetables at school? Share your thoughts with a comment below.

So check out the video, then read Dan’s review of our plans below. And if you’re in Austin in early April, stop by and see his coop on the tour!

Dan’s review of The Garden Coop plans

Dan also sent in some photos of his coop and notes to help others using The Garden Coop plans to build and customize their own walk-in chicken coop:

You have another happy customer down in Austin, Texas. This was my first “real” construction project and, while it took longer than I expected, I learned a lot and have no regrets about going all-out to build something great. My neighbors and coworkers have been following the project, and they are absolutely amazed at how nice it turned out.

I initially looked at hundreds of different coops in dozens of different styles, but none of them seemed to be suitable for my needs. Living in Texas, it was important to me that the design had good ventilation and protection from the sun.

The open-roof design works fantastically, and I like the semi-modular nature of the interior walls. Right now I am leaving the interior walls off so that heat can dissipate easily. The extra height makes it much more pleasant, and my 7-week-old pullets love to roost way up high in the “jungle.”

Some observations:

1. I used rough-cut cedar. It wasn’t until I had made the outer walls that I realized that this throws off the measurements a bit for certain areas (such as the human door). Adjusting for this was pretty easy, but this may be worth a mention for other novices such as myself.
2. I used deck screws just about everywhere rather than nails so it made it easy to go back and correct the occasional mistake.
3. I didn’t want to have to wire the upper and lower hardware cloth together, so I trimmed the cloth and stapled it together at the halfway point all around the coop. Then I wired extra cloth to the bottom where it is sunk into the earth. It worked OK, but probably wasn’t worth the effort.
4. I learned that some hardware cloth is just warped — particularly at the outer edges. Getting it to stay flat was tough until I bought a different brand from the hardware store.
5. Don’t work with wet wood, particularly the fence siding. Mine shrunk up almost 1/4″ in some places. so I had to redo a few boards.
6. Until I have more plant-shade on the side of the coop, I’ve slapped on a reed “fence” panel from the hardware store. I’ve been too busy to trim and line this up well, but it should look nice.
7. I found a really nice combination bolt-latch that should be safe. . . as long as I don’t tell the raccoons the combination.

Surviving the heat

Dan wrote again recently to share his experience with The Garden Coop during a brutal spell of Texas heat. Here’s what he said:

The coop served us well during a record-breaking heat wave last summer. We had 85 days of 100°+ heat, and I think that the wrong coop design would have been a disaster. Some of the tricks to keep things cool are:

1. A cheap mister line which is zip-tied to the hardware cloth on the ceiling.
2. Reed fencing, trellis, and an extra platform for shade.
3. Interior plywood walls are removed in summer.
4. Front window hinges open for ventilation and is covered with hardware cloth.
5. Interior henhouse door can be left open for ventilation.

Here are a few photos showing some of the things Dan mentions above — the mister, trellis (two views), and open window on the henhouse:

Visit Dan’s blog for more

As you can see from his video and photos above, Daniel has continued to modify The Garden Coop to suit his changing needs and ideas. You can read more about his coop modifications — and chickens and garden — on his urban homesteading blog, From Our Garden, including this post on how he added a trellis to the side of his chicken coop.

Many thanks to Dan for sharing his video, pictures, and ideas. Like what he’s done with his coop? Let him know with a comment below. And pass on the ideas!

Abby and John used The Garden Coop chicken coop plans to build this gorgeous coop for their California backyard. It’s a wonderful example of how something as functional as a chicken coop, when done right, can add beauty to an already beautiful outdoor garden space.

I’ve actually been meaning to post this coop profile for some time, so without further delay. . . here are Abby and John’s photos and notes on how they built a Garden Coop and made it their own. Enjoy!

Thanks for putting together such great plans. We made a few adaptations:

• We added a window on the front so the chickens can keep an eye on us from inside the hen house. This is basically the same cutout that is called for in the plans for the original egg door. Since we were going to build external nesting boxes, we just flipped that internal wall upside down so that the hole was up higher and more at window height.
• We rotated where the ramp came out of the henhouse so that there would be more room and shade for the chickens under the hen house. This worked well except that we got a lot of pine shavings from inside the hen house falling through the floor opening for the ramp and landing in the food/water. Our solution was to hang a shield that came with an old birdfeeder over the water – so nothing could fall in.
• For the upper roll of hardware cloth we found that hanging it by bungee cords as we worked our way around the coop made the job SO much easier (see picture).
• We used The Garden Coop plans for the external nesting boxes.
• We painted and stained everything before we built the coop (except the redwood siding). We were putting a lot of effort into it and wanted it to stay in good shape. We were concerned if we raced through the plans and built the coop, got the chickens in, it was unlikely we would really do all the work to paint and seal it.

It was a lot of work for us novice carpenters — but totally worth it. It is a beautiful and functional addition to our backyard. We are happy and the chickens are happy (and safe).

—Abby and John, Lafayette, California

More photos of their chicken coop. . .

A big thanks to Abby and John for sharing their pictures and tips. Like what they’ve done here? Any tips of your own to share? Let us know with a comment below!

Reading Gail Damerow’s new book The Chicken Encyclopedia: An Illustrated Reference I was sent back to the time when my family and I were first looking into keeping backyard chickens. We’d found a handful of very helpful books on the subject. But something about the format of your standard chapter-by-chapter book left us feeling overwhelmed — like we had to understand the whole book, or we wouldn’t be prepared to get started.

The Chicken Encyclopedia is different. This isn’t your typical “how to keep chickens” book. It’s, well, an encyclopedia. Not in the multi-volume World Book sense, but it goes well beyond a dictionary, covering a wide range of topics at a nice level of detail.

I know this isn’t the best metaphor, but by chopping up the subject of chickens into “nuggets,” Damerow has made it that much more digestible. You can sample what you need to know now and, as your appetite for knowledge grows, come back later for seconds. Mmmm.

Actually, rather than dabbling around, I found myself reading the book straight through. The illustrations pull you in, as do the entry titles themselves. Bleaching sequence? Gait scoring? Food running? I never knew how much I never knew. And if I did know it, I often didn’t know it had a name. Just hope you don’t run into me at a cocktail party anytime soon.

Sample Entry: “Chicken Coop”

Naturally, as a designer of chicken coops, I jumped right to Damerow’s entry for the term “chicken coop”:

chicken coop\ A shelter that houses chickens, which may be in the form of a shed, an ark, a hutch, a chicken tractor, or any number of other variations. An ideal chicken coop has these features:

• Provides adequate space for the number of chickens
• Is well ventilated
• Is free of drafts
• Maintains a comfortable temperature year-round
• Protects the chickens from wind and sun
• Keeps out rodents, wild birds, and predatory animals
• Offers plenty of light during the day
• Has adequate roosting space for the number of birds
• Includes clean nests for the hens to lay eggs
• Has a sufficient number of sanitary feed and water stations
• Is easy to clean
• Provides access to the outdoors during the day
• Is located where drainage is good

[Also called: henhouse]

This is right on, of course. And it points out how much there is to consider when buying or building your own backyard coop. The process doesn’t have to be hard, but for the best experience it should involve more than just cutting a hole in the side of a shed or throwing some chicken wire over an old swing set.

And while it’s not central to the definition, there’s one thing I would add to her list of ideal coop attributes, especially if you’re keeping chickens in an sub-/urban setting: It has to be nice to look at. You can certainly get by otherwise, but you and your nearest neighbors will be happier if you build something that’s worth admiring.

Join along on The Chicken Encyclopedia Blog Tour

If you’re new to Coop Thoughts, welcome! Click around a bit. If you’re new to this blog tour, check out the other sites that are participating:

• 3/2 For the Love of Chickens
• 3/3 Vintage Garden Gal
• 3/4 The Garden Roof Coop
• 3/5 Common Weeder
• 3/6 Chickens in the Road
• 3/7 Garden Rant
• 3/8 Fresh Eggs Daily
• 3/9 My Pet Chicken Blog
• 3/10 Coop Thoughts (You are here!)
• 3/11 BoHo Farm and Home
• 3/12 Happy Chickens Lay Healthy Eggs
• 3/13 A Charlotte Garden
• 3/14 Farm Fresh Fun
• 3/15 The HenCam
• 3/16 Life on a Southern Farm
• 3/17 ADozenGirlz, The Chicken Chick™
• 3/18 North Coast Gardening

CONTEST: Win a copy of The Chicken Encyclopedia

UPDATE (4/2/12): This contest is now over. Congratulations to Amberthyme, and thanks to everyone who participated by submitting a comment!

To celebrate the release of The Chicken Encyclopedia, Storey Publishing is giving a free book to one lucky Coop Thoughts reader. (Actually, every blog on the tour is doing the same, so enter there too!)

To enter: Leave a comment on this post about how you learned what you needed to know to get started keeping chickens. Grew up on a farm? Read a certain book? Went to a workshop? Learned from friends or neighbors? I know you’ve also learned a lot along the way, but what people or resources got you to where you were comfortable getting started?

This contest is open through March 31, 2012. Leave your email address with your comment (but not in your comment), so I can contact you if you win. One entry per person. Winner must be a U.S. resident. I’ll select a winner at random in early April and announce them here. Good luck!

Finally, subscribe to Coop Thoughts. You’ll get notice of the latest posts — on practical topics like external nest boxes, nipple waterers, and grazing frames — as they happen. It’s free, ad-free, and you can unsubscribe at any time. Click here to add your name to the list. You can also follow The Garden Coop on either Facebook or Google+. Thanks!

Kids, Meet Chickens

I would love to raise my kids on a farm. For a lot of reasons, that’s not going to happen. Like the majority of Americans I’m tethered to the city. But that doesn’t mean my children (9, 7, and 5 years old) can’t learn some of the lessons that farm kids take for granted.

Enter chickens.

Turns out a small flock of hens in the backyard can go a long way towards exposing children to things most city dwellers only get to read about in books. The concepts of natural cycles, environmental stewardship, biology, and our place in nature are no longer abstractions for my kids. Thanks to a small coop and a few chickens, these types of things have become concrete realities.

In particular, their feathered teachers have taught them five key lessons:

1. Where Their Food Really Comes From

Last spring, we had a young hen that hadn’t yet laid an egg. My younger daughter picked her up at the exact moment she decided to produce an egg. The egg settled in the crook of her arm. It’s possible for a kid to believe that eggs come from the back of grocery stores, but watching an egg come out the backside of chicken makes it pretty hard to hold onto that belief.

This morning, my seven-year-old son asked where bacon comes from. I told him what a pork belly is and how it’s cured and smoked. He shrugged and chewed away. It’s no shock to him that food comes from animals. When a chicken goes in the crockpot he knows what it is. He understands that dinner used to be walking around, pecking away, and crowing or laying eggs. He also knows that we want that animal to have been treated humanely when it was alive.

2. Natural Cycles

When you care for chickens, it’s hard to ignore some basic natural laws; namely, that nature operates in a cyclical fashion, and everything is connected. City life leads many kids to believe that food appears in big trucks from faraway places, it gets eaten, and its remains get hauled away. No more consideration on the subject is needed.

With the help of our chickens, what comes into our household, stays in our household (Vegas wishes it had it so good!). Our kids bring our table scraps out to the coop and exchange them for some fresh eggs. And even after we eat those eggs, the cycle keeps spinning — the shells go into the compost, releasing their minerals to the soil, the vegetables, then to us or our hens.

Of course, it’s possible to learn this same lesson with simply a compost pile, but composting isn’t nearly as fun to watch as a group of hungry hens tearing into last night’s dinner.

3. Our Dependence on the Countryside

Fact is, backyard chickens or not, cities depend on the surrounding countryside for their survival. We all depend on a healthy farm economy. We depend on a healthy ecosystem and people working the land for our way of life to continue. Obvious maybe, but hard to actually see in daily life.

A trip to the country feed store to pick up chicks offers a peek into a different world. Agricultural tools, supplies, animals aplenty. My children have visited small farms and country folk to buy pullets, straw, and feed — not to mention countless trips to u-pick farms. More than once, we’ve left with live hens in one arm and frozen rabbits or meat in the other, all the while developing relationships with people who make a living off the land.

4. How to Treat Each Other

Joel Salatin raises cows, chickens, and hogs on his world-famous Polyface Farm in Virginia. His animals live mainly outside. They breathe fresh air, eat grass and bugs, and generally live splendid lives. He rails against confined animal operations that have become the norm across our country. While Salatin has empathy for the animals, his main concern is more far-reaching, more about humanity than about the individual animals. Salatin says that when a culture treats animals with disregard, it’s easy to extend that same disregard to our fellow humans. We risk becoming more callous toward life in general and less sensitive to the pain we inflict on others.

When we’re building coops, buying feed, and fencing off areas of the yard, my kids and I have conversations about the choices we are making. Will this be enough room to keep them happy? Is there enough calcium in the feed for egg production? Do you think that they’ll be protected from the wind in this kind of coop? Is there enough sunshine in this spot?

To answer these questions correctly — heck, to ask them in the first place — we need to assume a relationship exists between the hens and us. If we can keep them happy and provide for some very basic needs, we’ll benefit by getting yummy, healthy eggs. It’s a reciprocal relationship where we both benefit. If we keep the hens happy, they’ll help keep us fed. If we treat them poorly, they’ll suffer from ill health, maybe even death, and we’ll suffer from a loss of eggs, at the very least.

It’s hard to imagine a better model for how we should treat each other: look out for one another, lend a hand, and don’t demand too much in return.

5. Life and Death

For something to live, something else has to die. Raising hens gives children a glimpse into this existential truth. Keep chickens long enough and your kids will be witness to the death of an animal.

My children have seen baby chicks die for unknown reasons. A neighbor’s dog got into the yard recently and killed two hens. My daughter held a wake, kind words were spoken, and the beloved ladies were buried in the backyard, deep beneath where our new hens now poke around.

Last summer, a farmer skillfully butchered a few of our older hens as we watched. My kids know that life literally goes on — and they understand it in a way that other kids (cousins, friends) do not. It might be overly dramatic to say that our chickens gave their lives so that we could learn these things, but it’s true in a sense, and I’m grateful to them for that.

A More Natural Life

It’s entirely possible to teach my kids about ecology, animal rights, and the cycles of life by using books, videos, and lectures. Parents and teachers attempt it all the time. Possible. But I have my doubts that any of it really sticks. There’s very little that is life-affirming about those methods. Nothing replaces feeding, caring for, and protecting an actual living being. An animal that your kids can partner with to make, in some small way, a more natural life.

Morgan Emrich is a freelance writer, husband, father of three, and caretaker of a Leghorn and an Araucana, a.k.a.”South American Rumpless” (a good name if there ever was one). He lives in Portland, Oregon.

What lessons, big or small, have you or your children learned by caring for chickens? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

But keeping your chickens supplied with fresh greens can be a challenge. When chickens have plenty of room to roam, they will graze a little off the top, then move on. When forage space is limited, however, as in a small urban or suburban backyard, chickens will continue to graze and scratch in the same spot until the vegetation is torn down to the roots.

An easy solution? Grazing frames! But before we get to that, let’s look at some of the more common ways of greening your chickens in a small space.

Some common solutions for getting fresh greens to your chickens

• Bring the vegetation to them. Grass clippings, food scraps, garden debris, sprouted grains, and so on are all good ways to get supplemental greens into your chickens’ diet. Just toss them in, and the chickens will have a feast.
• Build a chicken tractor. If you have a little more room and are committed to moving the tractor from spot to spot, an open bottom chicken tractor lets you control where the chickens graze in your yard. We rotate our Garden Ark through our vegetable beds so the chickens can till and fertilize the soil and help control weeds and pests. You can also move your chicken tractor across your yard, giving them a fresh spot of grass each time. You’ll want to move it every two or three days to keep them from laying the grass bare.
• Use a paddock system. This is where you build your chicken coop in the center of three or more enclosed yards, then you give the chickens access to one “sub”-yard at a time. Once they’ve decimated the vegetation in one, you close that yard off for rest and replanting, and let the chickens into the next yard, and so on.
• Plant vegetation specifically for your hens. This can be part of a paddock, free range, or simple day-run setup. (Here’s a good resource for what to plant.)

All of these are great solutions, depending on your particular space and needs. There’s another solution, though, that I’ve found to be easy to set up and easy to maintain, and that provides a steady source of fresh green grass inside a small space.

Grazing frames

In our yard, we have one small dedicated day run for our hens located right next to their Garden Coop. In all, it provides only about 100 square feet of grazing area. Fully greened, it would only take a few days for our flock of nine to tear it all down to bare earth. My first attempt at keeping it green was to divide the yard into a couple of paddocks. This required a lot of tending, and there were long stretches of time where both paddocks were closed to recover and regrow.

Then I discovered grazing frames in an article by gardening writer Vern Nelson. Grazing frames are simple two-by-four frames with hardware cloth (welded wire mesh) attached across the top. Set one above a patch of grass, and the grass will grow up through the openings. Your chickens can snack on the green tips, and the frame protects the roots so that the grass survives to grow another day.

The design I present here is a modified version of Mr. Nelson’s, but it’s basically the same idea: protect the roots, grow the shoots.

A few notes before getting started

Assess your skill level. If you’ve used our coop plans to build your backyard chicken coop, you could probably do this project blindfolded (not recommended).

Time. About 30 minutes per frame? Let me know in the comments.

Measurements. Feel free to modify to meet your needs and materials. Metric units appear in green.

Safety. Read our disclaimer. Follow all manufacturers’ instructions when using tools, materials, or equipment. Protect your eyes, ears, and limbs. Build safe, and have fun!

Grazing frame plans for your backyard chickens

Materials List (to build one 5′ x 3′ frame – 1450 x 865 mm)

• 2  8-foot (2400 mm) two-by-fours. Note: The wood will be in direct contact with the ground, so either choose a naturally rot-resistant species like cedar or redwood or use a cheaper softwood (spruce, pine, fir) and seal it well or preserve it with a garden-safe product like Timber Pro UV Internal Wood Stabilizer.
• 1  6-foot (1800 mm) one-by-two. See note above.
• 3″ (75 mm) exterior screws
• About 50 galvanized poultry fencing staples (do NOT use ordinary staples from a staple gun!)
• 5′ length of 3′ wide (914 mm), 1/2 in. (13 x 13 mm) hardware cloth, also known as “welded wire mesh”

Tools List

• Circular saw or handsaw
• Couple of sawhorses
• Power driver with assorted drill and driver bits
• Tape measurer
• Hammer
• Wire snips (for cutting hardware cloth)

Instructions

Cut each of your 2 two-by-fours into a 60″ (1450 mm) piece and a 34″ (865 mm) piece. These will make up the outer edges of the frame (see diagram below).

Cut the one-by-two into two 34″ (865 mm) pieces. These will be the two center spans.

Lightly sand the cut pieces and paint, seal, or treat them as needed with a non-toxic wood preservative like Internal Wood Stabilizer.

Attach the two-by-four pieces together to form the outer edges of the frame, using 3″ (75 mm) exterior screws, two per joint. Refer to the diagram for placement. You will probably want to pre-drill the holes to prevent splitting.

Attach the one-by-two pieces evenly spaced between the outer edges and flush with what will be the top edge of the frame, using one 3″ (75 mm) screw per joint. By using one-by-twos here instead of two-by-fours, and by attaching them near the top of the frame, they will support the wire mesh without resting on the ground, allowing more grass to grow.

Note: You can build the frame to whatever dimensions you choose, but be sure to space your supports every 2′ or less apart (600 mm). It might seem like overkill, but a flock of hens can be pretty hefty, especially when they all converge in one spot atop the frame.

Attach the hardware cloth to the top of the frame at the perimeter, stapling it down well, every 3-4 inches or so (75-100 mm). There’s no need to attach it to the center supports. If you’ve built a coop using either of our chicken coop plans, you’re already a pro at this!

Prepare an even bed of well-fertilized soil, then plant grass seed or grain. I just fluff up the soil a bit, then scatter the seeds generously and rake them in a bit until they’re mostly buried to about the depth of their diameter. As for what to plant, I’ve used both a mix of grains (wheat, kamut, etc.) and a rye-grass mix with success. The grains gave a faster, more prolific growth, as you can see in the photos below. The rye grass (not pictured) was slower growing and finer, but lasted longer. As of this writing, I think I prefer the grains.

Set the frames over the seeded ground, adjust for positioning, and give the whole thing a generous, but gentle watering. Let the sunshine do the rest, and water as needed.

Voila! When the grass tops stick up above the wire, it’s time to let the chickens out into their new pasture paradise. (Actually, you can let them out as soon as you have the frames over the seed. Our hens just happened to be young at the time, so it was them we were waiting on to mature, not the grass.)

VIDEO: Here’s a quick clip of our young chickens grazing on their frames for the first time. Here’s another clip.

Maintaining your grazing frame pasture

So how do you suppose your hens will repay you for all this work? Like they always do: with poop (then later with eggs). Poop on the grazing frames is a good thing. Simply hose it down through the cracks as you give the bed an occasional watering, and in moderate doses, it will help fertilize the soil.

Too much nitro-poop could burn the plants, though, so keep an eye on it. I usually let the poop dry a bit first, then aim a higher pressure stream of water low and across the surface of the frames, rolling the poop, leaves, and other debris off to the side.

Over time, blades of dead grass may form a thatch atop the mesh. You can lightly rake across the top from time to time to remove this thatch, or simply continue to water.

Eventually, the bed will tire out. The photo below was taken about three months after planting. There is still plenty of life in this patch. I think we got another month or so out of it before we opened it up and let the chickens go to town on the bugs and roots beneath.

When it’s time to replant, the frames have a big advantage over the paddock system in that you can let your chickens back into their day yard right away. The frames protect the seeds from the start.

Pass it on!

Grazing frames are an easy and effective way to supplement your chickens’ diet with fresh grass, yet I’m amazed by how few people are using them. Far from being an advanced chicken keeping technique, this is a simple do-it-yourself project that every backyard chicken keeper should consider. So pass it on!

Of course, continue to give your chickens all the greens and grass clippings you can find for them, but with a few grazing frames in their day yard you can make sure that they have at least some pasture at all times. I believe you’ll notice a difference in both your chickens’ happiness and the quality of their eggs.

I hope you’ve found this tutorial helpful. If you want a do-it-yourself coop to go with your grazing frames, check out our chicken coop plans, available in both U.S. standard/imperial units and metric units.

Unlike with the coop plans, I do not offer email support for this free grazing frame plan. But if you have any questions, comments, success stories, or tips on how to keep your backyard chickens in the green, please leave a comment below, and I’ll do my best to respond.

Finally, subscribe to Coop Thoughts. You’ll get notice of the latest posts as they happen. It’s free, ad-free, and you can unsubscribe at any time. Click here to add your name to the list. You can also follow The Garden Coop on either Facebook or Google+. Thanks!

Colin and Faye sent in this inspiring story along with pictures of their beautiful, rustic Garden Coop build and tips for other chicken coop builders in Australia. The rest of this post comes from them. . . .

Our Garden Coop build

We have finished our chicken coop and our six eight-week-old chickens took up residence last Saturday. Thank you for such easy-to-understand plans. For my husband Colin and I, this was our first venture in building anything, and we are very pleased with the outcome.

Giving the chicken coop a rustic Australian look

We used corrugated iron on the left and back walls of the hen house. We had it left over from making some garden beds, and along with the second-hand fence palings on the other two walls, it makes our coop very rustic and Australian looking.

We put the ladder on the side wall and added a door so that our chickens are safely locked away from the many foxes around here at night.

Some tips for fellow Australian coop builders

• With the timber, the 90 x 38 mm boards converted to 90 x 35 mm available here. That may be helpful for others here in Australia to keep in mind. Other measurements in the plans were just right.
• We were able to get the SunTuf polycarbonate roofing here as well.
• At first I could not work out what “hardware cloth” was, but then realized it was wire mesh. The size of the wire mesh is the same here in Australia.
• It was not hard to work out equivalents or substitutes, so thank you for the metric conversion.

A great DIY project, at any age

This has been a terrific project for us, we are in our early sixties. I have learnt so many new skills, and I am so proud of my husband who has Parkinson’s disease, with what he was able to accomplish.

Now we have the pleasure of watching our chickens, which is so relaxing, and look forward to when they start to lay!

—Faye and Colin, Mirboo North, Australia

Thanks to Faye and Colin for sharing their story, tips, and coop pictures! Like what they’ve done? Leave a quick comment to let us know. And feel free to subscribe to Coop Thoughts to get first notice of the latest posts by email. It’s free, ad-free, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

They say you can’t judge a book by its cover, and while I’m admittedly biased in this case — that’s a real-life Garden Coop chicken coop in the background of the cover shot! — garden designer Jessi Bloom’s new book Free-Range Chicken Gardens is as lush and inspiring as the chicken paradise featured on the front.

The premise of the book is simple: how do you best integrate chickens into a backyard vegetable or permaculture garden. Bloom does a wonderful job of showing you how, drawing not only from her own experience as a garden designer and chicken keeper, but also from the experiences of a diverse group of chicken gardeners she profiles throughout the book.

Topics covered include all the basics of keeping backyard chickens plus how to create a plan for a chicken-friendly garden and what plants to include/avoid in your chickens’ day yard. The illustrations are clear. Kate Baldwin’s photos are gorgeous.

Seriously, if I were a chicken, I’d want to live in this book — or at least in one of the gardens featured in this book — one of which is the handiwork of horticulturalist Alana Meyer. Alana’s sumptuous Washington State garden adorns the book’s cover along with the chicken coop she built using The Garden Coop plans and her own two hands.

Have you read Jessi’s book? Follow her blog? Leave a quick comment and let us know what you think, what you’ve learned, and what you’ve been inspired to do with your garden and chickens.