Description
With The Garden Ark plans, you’re just days away from having a mobile coop that both you and your chickens will love. And you’re that much closer to enjoying those prized garden-fresh eggs.
Key features of The Garden Ark mobile chicken coop design:
- Keep up to 3 hens
- Ample ventilation and light
- Measures about 3’w x 6’d x 4’h (.9m x 1.8m x 1.2m)
- Move it around for grazing and/or fertilizing your garden (it has wheels!)
- Know your flock is safe with tough protection against predators
- Open floor for grazing, can be secured as needed
- Easy access through the dedicated egg door and larger double doors
- Can be incorporated with raised vegetable beds
- Fits perfectly in the bed of a small pickup
- Hardware Quick Kit available (U.S. only)
- Built with pride. . . by you!
About The Garden Ark chicken coop plans:
- Instant download
- 45+ pages of illustrations, photos, and step-by-step instructions
- Written for beginners, with simple cuts and techniques
- Includes full tool and material lists
- Features construction tips based on years of customer feedback
- Purchase includes both U.S. (feet/inches) and metric (millimeters) versions
- Compatible with iPad and other PDF-friendly mobile devices
- Satisfaction guaranteed
- Click here for free plan previews: U.S. | Metric
Put your chickens right where they want to be.
There are many advantages to having a portable chicken coop, but foremost among them is that you can give your chickens new ground to graze, till, and fertilize — all while keeping them safe and sheltered.
The Garden Ark mobile chicken coop mimics the efficient, integrated design of larger walk-in coop designs, but is scaled down for a smaller flock. You get the raised henhouse, plenty of light and ventilation, and an open floor that allows your chickens to snack on grass and bugs and work the soil.
Set them atop raised vegetable beds. Move them around the yard. Or just park the coop for a while (you can leave the bottom open or secure it for additional protection). The Garden Ark coop functions as either a permanent home or as a companion to a stationary coop. It lets you focus your chickens’ activity right where you want it — and right where they most want to be.
From shopping to cutting to putting it all together.
The Garden Ark chicken coop plans show you exactly what you need to get and exactly what to do with it. In just a few days, you can build a high-end coop at a much more modest do-it-yourself price.
The frame is made of two-by-two lumber and sits atop two-by-four skids. This is all wrapped with wood siding and half-inch hardware cloth then topped with a translucent, polycarbonate roof. There’s a roost inside and out, a single nest box and egg door, a sliding door between the henhouse and run, and large double doors for your own access for care and cleaning.
Make it your own.
The Garden Ark mobile chicken coop design has been built by backyard chicken enthusiasts around the world since 2009. So along with these plans, you enjoy the benefit of the knowledge, ideas, and examples of those who’ve built the ark before you.
Paint it your grandkids’ favorite color, add natural wood roosts or a ladder, wire up a thermostat, set it atop veggie beds, modify it to keep bunnies — these are just some of the ways others have made The Garden Ark their own. What will you come up with?
A place for everything
The double doors on the side give you wide access to the hen house above and the enclosed chicken run below. They are easily secured with a barrel-bolted latch at the top and bottom. You can hang a small chicken feeder and/or waterer from the henhouse floor (or add a support to hold even more weight). Or you can just set the feeder and waterer up on a brick or block on the ground beneath the hen house.
The egg door gives you access to the nesting box and to the sliding door between the henhouse and enclosed run. The sliding henhouse door allows you to close your chickens up in the henhouse at night, or any time. The entire coop is quite predator proof, actually, but with the sliding door shut, the hen house is practically impenetrable.
Also, the sliding door is designed with an offset at the bottom so that the tracks stay free of any straw, wood shavings, or other litter material in the henhouse. Every step of how to build this chicken coop is explained in the plans.
Take your chicken coop for a spin.
Add a pair of wheels to the back end of The Garden Ark portable chicken coop to roll it where you need it. The Garden Ark plan also describes what modifications you’d need to make if you wanted to attach even larger wheels.
You can even fit The Garden Ark in the bed of a small pickup (or El Camino!), making it the perfect mobile chicken coop for the truly mobile chicken keeper.
Or park it over a veggie bed.
Build raised vegetable beds that fit The Garden Ark mobile chicken coop perfectly, and incorporate your chickens into your seasonal garden rotation. See the free plans here. Building beds to match your ark gives you all the benefits of a chicken tractor — focusing the chickens’ grazing, tiling, and fertilizing activity where you want it — along with the convenience of raised beds. Our free raised bed plans make it easy to build beds that lock together with your coop.
The perfect first, second (or third) chicken coop
Most first-time chicken keepers start with just one coop, of course. Yet as you get further along in the practice of keeping chickens, there are several reasons you might want another coop around — to expand your flock, brood chicks, separate a chicken (a broody or sick hen, for instance), or add a walk-in coop to the function of your mobile tractor. Whatever the reason, The Garden Ark looks smashing alongside our other coop designs!
Dock your ark to a backyard chicken “space station” by adding The Garden Run plans.
We designed The Garden Run enclosure series with all of our coops in mind. For The Garden Ark, it offers the distinct advantage of letting you dock your mobile chicken tractor to a larger secured area. The Garden Run plans also include instructions for adding a pop door to The Garden Ark, so that the ark can remain mobile when it’s not attached.
There is also a roof design (with rafters) in The Garden Run plans that, while intended initially for those modules, just so happens to fit the ark perfectly! Something to consider if you want to mimic the style of The Garden Coop.