Chick Brooder Gets a New Roof
The chicks are old enough to go outdoors now, but we like to keep them separate from the adults for a few weeks while they figure out how to get along with each other. I have a small brooder cage that I made a long time ago just for this purpose. It gives the chicks a place to hide from the adults when they get picked on and gives them their own roosts that they don’t have to compete for.
Most of the brooder is holding up very well even though it has been outdoors all year round for 14 years.
We have a lot of red cedar (a type of juniper) trees on our property, so I hand cut cedar timbers for the frame of the brooder. The corner posts and roosts are small cedar logs mortised into the frame. I even made some diagonal corner braces with half dovetails mortised into the bottom frame and a cedar framed door for the top of the cage. The structure is very sturdy, enough so that it stands up to being roughly pushed out of the back of the truck or dragged around without any sign of the joints loosening.
The plywood roof was solid for about 7 years, now it is completely rotten.
Even exterior plywood can’t take being wet all the time. I kept it covered with tar paper for a while to extend its life, but now it is like wet cardboard.
The new roof is treated deck boards. Dad and I cut and nailed them in place in about 20 minutes. The chicks are thriving in their new home and made it though Tropical Storm Michael with no problem.
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My grandpa had chickens. I can remember helping him to take care of them when I was little. We had lots of fun together doing it.
That is a happy thought. My daughter has lived with chickens her whole life, but she imagines herself as a city girl and can't wait to get out of the country.
Someday she might bring her children to grandpa's house and we will gather eggs together.
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Yes...and her children will love gathering eggs just like I did!
Glad to hear Michael wasn't an issue for the birds! Great post! I didn't know cedar was related to Juniper. Very neat. Thanks for sharing as always!
Western Red Cedar is supposedly a "true" cedar. It is the stuff that pencils are made of; the siding of our house is also Western Red Cedar. The trees are huge, like a redwood.
Eastern Red Cedar is a smaller tree with deep red, aromatic heartwood. It is a natural moth repellant; my parents always kept wool sweaters in a cedar chest to keep the moths away.
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oh! yes. I remember when I used to live up north, cedar chests were popular among my family. We have a cedar tree that grows here in Panama, in Spanish it's cedro. It smells just like what I remember the chests smelling like and it's a similar reddish color. Cedar also reminds me of the days when I worked in a pet store in high school. hahaha.
-Dashaina
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