Lengths of old corrugated iron dictated the roof pitch.

A friend skilled at welding fabricated a drawbar to make towing easy. Fortunately there was plenty of corrugated iron to recycle.

human. Lengths of old corrugated iron lying around dictated the roofpitch. A visiting friend – handy with a welder – fabricated a draw-bar. The tyres responded to air without haemorrhaging, and then we were down to fine details.

The nesting boxes go across one end of the structure, tucked-in enough to dodge all but the most driven rain. They have a sloping floor (a slope of about 1:6 was the consensus) so the eggs roll away under a divider the hens can’t get past. A couple of hinged plywood lids, one to access the boxes, the other the egg-collection space, finished it off.

Water was a headache. This tractor needs to be easily towed through farm gates, which suggested the trough should be mounted underneath. But how to mount a trough underneath something that is all perch, in a way that it didn’t get knocked off in transit or filled with guano, had us beat.

We settled on a side-mounted trough cut from an old mussel float and melted into shape with a heat gun, with a

hinged-down gang plank, all hung on No8 wire, our hat tip to culture.

We left before the tractor was finally commissioned but Debi reports that they’ve added an end door to cut down on the internal draughtiness. Otherwise the eggs seem to be being laid in the correct place and the hens seem to be sleeping in their new house most of the time.

What more can you ask?