coop – My tiny u.p. farm

Farm updates Mid July 2025

July 15, 2025Jen PowellLeave a comment

The garden is growing, and the chickens are getting larger too. We put the chickens into their new home on July 4th. Here you can see they were almost outgrowing their box, and pics of their first day in the coop.

They are really enjoying their coop. They chase each other around, and we’ve put watermelon in for them on hot days and they love that as a treat.

The garden is growing as well. It went from this in early July:

To this yesterday:

I am realizing as the plants have grown in that I kind of overcrowded things a little. I think it is looking really nice though, and some space should be recovered as I harvest things. Nothing seems like its growth is hindered. I have had deer jumping over my fence and munching on some stuff though so I put some strategically-placed sticks and pieces of fence in the beds to try to deter them. I may have to work harder in the future to fix that issue but there is so much outside of my garden they can eat that I hope my current efforts are enough.

I’m starting to get some harvest now, my chard is getting big enough to pick and I’ll have rat tail radishes soon:

Here you can see the pods growing. I grew these radishes a couple of years ago, and they were tasty. I cooked them like green beans, just sauteed them. It’s a radish plant that gets edible pods up on top instead of the big root down below. I have green beans growing in the same bed, so once these produce I’ll pull them out, let the bean plants get a little bigger, and maybe plant another crop of one of them where these were.

The garden is doing great and it’s very exciting.

A new group of friends for the farm

June 18, 2025June 18, 2025Jen PowellLeave a comment

We got new chickens! If you are a longtime follower of the blog, or have read my old posts, you know that I had chickens for about 5 years, until spring of 2020. We really enjoyed them, but it had gotten too much to take care of them in the wintertime, and was very expensive at the time with all our birds. I think we had 20 chickens or so, plus some ducks when we gave our birds to the neighbor. It’s been a few years now and I missed having them. Then this spring with the price of eggs and everything going on I decided to get some, but only a few. I ordered 6 female chicks. They arrived at the beginning of June. They are just over 2 weeks old now. Here are some pictures of my hens.

We ordered 6 from a mail-order place: 2 easter eggers, 2 fibro-easter eggers (full black chickens), and 2 black/blue splash chickens. When they arrived, one had died in transit, and then one died the next day. The chicken company refunded me for those two, and I went and picked up 2 more hens at Tractor supply, some Buff Orpingtons. I wanted to make sure everyone was the same age, and not have to introduce anyone later. I’m not sure what kind of chicken everyone above is, except the 2 yellow ones are my Buff Orpingtons. We’ll have to wait and see how everyone feathers out to know what is what.

My old coop from before was a converted old sauna building, that is now kind of falling apart and is mostly just used for storage. I decided not to use that and ordered a small coop for my hens. It came as prefabricated parts that we then assembled. I think it will be nice for my hens once they are ready to go outside. The coop came with a small run, and it’s light enough that we plan to move it to our front porch for winter time. That will make it easier for us to take care of them in the winter, and keep them out of some of the snow. Here is our coop:

I also have some predator proofing stuff to add to the bottom to keep creatures from digging underneath – we haven’t added that yet. We just set it up and added some waterproofing. I used to let my chickens free range all over our property, but that got annoying – I had to fence in all my plants everywhere because the chickens used flower beds as dust baths. If I feel that they need more room to roam I may add some temporary movable fencing around the coop and run, so I can give them a little more foraging space.

I’m excited for our new little flock. They are all healthy and doing well. I have another month or so before they are ready for the outdoor coop, but I think they will really like it.

September in the Coop

September 25, 2016September 25, 2016Jen PowellLeave a comment

We’ve had a lot happening in the chicken/duck coop lately. The ducks are doing well in there with the chickens. It has been a little more humid when I open the coop in the morning, but some of that could be the fact that we are constantly getting rain – this summer was abnormally wet, and it has continued into September. Luckily the temps are more autumn-like. We started with straw bedding a couple years ago, which turned into cob on the floor – thanks to the ducks, the humidity moistened that cob layer so I was able to finally get it all off the floor today. They now have a super-clean freshly cleaned coop floor. (We switched to pine shavings and it’s been really nice – it doesn’t turn solid on the floor and it smells nice when you lay it down).

We have been getting eggs from the 2nd batch-hatch hens, and are up to about a dozen-plus a day. My third batch chickens are only 2 months old, so they will start laying later.

We have a whole lot of roosters, and more coming up. I gave one of our youngest, from the third batch, away to a friend who needed a rooster. With some of the youngest chickens it’s still hard to tell which gender they are, so we’ll have to see. We will have to cull some roosters, and I was planning on doing that a couple weeks ago, but I ended up waiting – they are still with us for the time being. We’ll probably start culling some when it gets a little cooler. I sold our lone bantam hen to someone who had other bantams. One of our large roosters mounted her and I was afraid he was going to kill her, so I rehomed her quickly.

Here are some scenes from the coop: