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The ChookmobileRSS feed

Posted: Wednesday 12 February, 2014

by Rosemary Champion at 3:51pm in Poultry 2 comments Comments closed

We've bought a caravan. Cost us £50 from the caravan storage place along the road. We're hoping to get it home tomorrow and start stripping it out, for conversion into a mobile henhouse.

We have a flock of "scratchers" - about 20 in number that have "retired" from the main flock and now live in three small henhouses next to the field shelter ('cos I'm too soft to cull them). Because of the position of their houses, they tend to forage in Home and Near Top paddocks - and they do a real good job of breaking up dung and so on.

We discussed a number of options but decided to try a converted caravan that we can move round the six paddocks as part of the spring / summer / autumn rotation - cattle, sheep, poultry, harrow and rest. And cleaning out the wee houses is a pain and, to be honest, two of them are getting past their best.

I will post photos of the chookmobile in due course, but if anyone has done this before and has any advice on the conversion, please share :-)

 

Comments

Womble

Wednesday 12 February, 2014 at 6:01pm

One tip: give serious consideration to putting a hole in the floor that you can just shovel the waste out of. If the base is high enough, this could be into a wheelbarrow, but when we had Hubbards last year, we just shovelled it out onto the ground, then spread it out a bit. The worms soon made it disappear, and it didn't seem to affect the grass any. HTH!

Rosemary

Thursday 13 February, 2014 at 2:28pm

That's a really good idea, Womble. Thanks for that - will defo try and incorporate it. Anything that makes cleaning easier is a winner for me :-)

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