Have a Seat!
ROOSTING and LAYING are popular poultry pastimes, so get the RIGHT SETUP for your flock.
Roosting and laying are two popular poultry pastimes, so get the right setup for your flock.
Chickens are the quintessential homestead animal, yet they can be among the most expensive for such a small creature. Between a coop, roosts, laying boxes, waterers and feeders, you can easily spend $1,000 establishing a small flock on the farm.
Take standard metal laying boxes for example. A 10-spot box set costs about $200. I have seen coops at trade shows that cost more than $2,000. Unless your chicken lays golden eggs, such expense makes little sense. It’s also unnecessary, because you can make many of the things that chickens need from repurposed materials. In this article, I look at two chicken-support areas that are easy DIYs: roosting and laying boxes.
Roosting & Perching
Proper roosts play an important role for a chicken flock. First, it’s just natural. Chickens are made to roost, for their health and their safety. If you don’t provide roosting, they’ll find something, somewhere to use for roosting, often in unhelpful or exposed places that put them at risk.
In my early homesteading years, my family commonly found our chickens 10 or more feet up in the joists and rafters of our barn. We have also found chickens on top of wood piles and chicken coops, in trees near the coop and a dozen other places.
The good news? Roosts don’t have to cost much or take much time or effort to create. Before humans domesticated chickens, the birds found their nightly shelter in the eaves and boughs of various trees. Many a homesteader, instead of letting the chickens live out under the stars — with racoons, possums, owls and other animals that also enjoy late-night chicken dinners — cut down some branches and installed them in coops.
If you go the tree-branch or similar DIY route, you must consider some general roosting rules. First, you need about 8 inches of roosting space for each chicken. This works out to about 8 feet of roosting space for each dozen laying hens. If you raise larger breeds, plan for 10 to 12 inches per bird.
It’s also important that roosts provide sufficient and properly staggered space, especially if you use multitiered roosting. Birds don’t mind multilevel perching; it helps support the “pecking order” that governs a flock. But if the perching levels sit right above each other instead of offset and staggered, the birds can’t access the upper tier without causing a commotion below. Also, it means the upper level waste disposal falls right on the members of the flock below.
Simple Double-H Roosts
My farm once had 200 to 300 chickens in its laying flock. That many chickens requires a large amount of roosting space. That many birds also produce an incredible amount of manure. We thus sought a simple, inexpensive, durable, easily portable approach to providing them with adequate roosting space.
What we found are “double H” roosts (pictured opposite page). Made out of 2-by-4s or slightly smaller pieces of wood, these take only a few minutes to make. They last just about forever; many of our sets are more than eight years old, and the wood — when no longer needed for roosts — serves as the end caps on our new approach to our wood stacks.
For the cross pieces, you can easily use tree branches. I have even seen people secure
the branches using twine or rope instead of screws. To prevent it from slowly sliding down the uprights, notch the uprights to allow the cross pieces to have more support than just the rope or twine. You don’t want a clucking calamity to befall your chicken flock.
While we tried triple-H roosts, we discovered that the chickens didn’t need or use the lowest level. The spacing is crucial with the roosts. If you wonder why removable roosting was important to us, the answer is simple: maintenance and cleaning.
We wanted easy coop cleanout, which for a few years was the back portion of our barn, sectioned off with plywood and wire. When our roosting was screwed or otherwise secured in place, working around the roosts to clean the manure-laced bedding was difficult, especially for our kids. With the movable roosting, we reduced the cleanout time by half, as we could easily move and maneuver ourselves and our tools in and around the coop. This small change made a big difference in time and frustration.
Also, know that chickens roost as high as possible. So if you house chickens in a building that has higher places to perch, they might use the roosts you provide as a way to reach the higher levels. Chickens often don’t stop ascending until they hit ceiling or sky. If you have a high interior, install some netting or other roofing feature to keep them from perching on and possibly damaging the structure.
Laying Boxes
The general recommendation is one laying box per three to five birds. In my experience, the birds all want to use the same three or so boxes, even if 10 are present.
Milk crates can make great DIY nesting boxes. That said, it’s best to give them options. Too few laying boxes leads to stress, fights and other unwanted behaviors.
You can easily purchase laying boxes, but you can also find low-cost and DIY items that, by using some basic skills, you can repurpose. Some of our favorites are empty cat litter containers, 5-gallon or similar buckets and discarded milk crates. While the litter boxes are great, they work only for smaller chicken breeds and other small poultry.
Larger fowl sometimes won’t take kindly to confined laying quarters. They prefer boxes that are 10 to 12 inches or so deep and wide. A standard milk crate is 10 inches deep and 12½ by 12½ inches — perfect for most poultry.
You might think: “Can’t you just cut wood to make laying boxes?” Yes, but given the time and cost, reusing milk crates and similar materials just makes more sense.
Similar to roosts, especially if you have a larger flock, I prefer movable laying boxes. They make your setup easy to clean. For this, old milk crates excel, as they are easy to spray down and wash, and they also dry quickly because of the high air flow their design allows.
A few notes on DIY designs. First, chickens don’t mind multitiered laying facilities or ones that are off the ground. They value proper size and privacy. Also, any lofted laying boxes should have a landing bar that sits in front of them.
Second, if you use containers with open faces — such as a milk crate on its side instead of on its bottom — it’s best to angle the laying boxes back or to put an edge along the front to ensure eggs don’t roll out. Egg eating is a hard habit to break, and reducing the likelihood that chickens will accidentally break an egg can strengthen your flock’s chances for success.
It’s crucial that you design your coop and nest boxes to keep your chickens from roosting on, above or in the boxes.
The first way to do this is by ensuring there’s adequate roosting space for the number of birds you keep. Inadequate roosting space sometimes means birds that are low on the pecking order seek alternative accommodations, even if that means unnaturally using the nest boxes to escape their aggressive counterparts.
Second, you can put a sloped roof over the laying boxes to discourage roosting. Also, make sure your design leaves no enticing roosting spot above the boxes, especially ones that chickens can easily jump to from their proper roosting space.
Cleanouts
Have you ever found chicken poop in the laying box, or have mucky weather or a broken egg make a mess in the nice clean laying box bedding? Keeping laying boxes clean is important, especially if you sell eggs. While you can wash eggs, who wants all that extra work? The need to wash eggs usually points to poor management of the chickens, and it often means other possible problems for your flock.
Just the same, constantly cleaning the laying boxes isn’t fun either. Years ago, we found a simple trick to keep our laying boxes squeaky clean. We line the boxes with cardboard and then fill in the nesting material (almost always straw).
If a box gets messy, we reach in, grab the upturned edges of the cardboard and lift out the entire contents, which generally get dumped onto the floor of the chicken coop to compost with all the other material. If the cardboard is still in good condition, it goes back into the nest box, covered by fresh bedding.
This makes it easy to keep nest boxes clean while also keeping the eggs (and us) clean as well.
John Moody is a homesteader in the hills of Kentucky. He is also the author of The Frugal Homesteader Handbook and a well-known writer and speaker. He is fortunate to have a great wife (Jessica) and five fantastic kids. You can learn more about them at www.abbyselderberry.com and www.homesteaderhandbook.com.