Tuesday, December 07, 2010

Goodbye, annoying old chicken coop

Today I finally managed to dispose of my old chicken coop. A volunteer from the Portland Backyard Chicken group picked it up with her pickup and drove it down to a family in Salem who needs a chicken coop. I'm glad to be rid of it. After two raccoon attacks, it just had bad mojo. Plus, it was a lousy design. I hope the new owners manage to reinforce it (I did warn them) and tweak the design so that it works for them. Meanwhile, our occasional landscaper Jose is coming tomorrow to help dig out the ditch around the new coop so I can install the hardware cloth and bury it a foot deep. I also bought a beautiful double-glazed, six-paned window today at the Rebuilding Center that I am going to incorporate into the henhouse design.

3 comments:

Karen said...

Post a photo when you get it finished!

Amanda said...

Jenny, I read your account of lead contaminated chicken eggs on urban mamas. We have had a very similar experience and my daughter's lead level test returned a 4. We have now removed what we believe was the contaminated soil but I can't find any information online about how long it might take for the lead levels in the eggs to drop as a result--did you ever figure this out? if not, what did you do with your chickens and their eggs? Thank you!

Jennifer said...

Hi Amanda, I never did figure out how long it takes. Our flock was wiped out by a raccoon soon afterward, so we got new hens... at this point we have a new set of hens and I just haven't been worrying about it as much. For a while I just bought eggs at the store for my daughter, and my husband and I ate the "leaded" eggs. The lead levels were so low, and we were eating so few eggs, that I figured it wouldn't hurt us (too much!). We now have our chickens in a different part of the yard where I think the lead levels are lower.