I Love This Time of Year
Yesterday we were blessed with another beautiful spring day, and this morning, I am feeling it! But, I was finally able to get into the front section of our greenhouse/chicken coop combo and get some stuff done. And I couldn't be happier with the results.However, I had been using it for a chicken coop pretty much ever since we moved in here. which is a role that is serves exceptionally well by the way. I got the idea from Joel Salatin at Polyface farms and have been housing my chickens and rabbits in this greenhouse every winter. But there is one problem with it, at least the way that I have been doing it, and that is the dust.
I like to use the deep litter method in my chicken coops, mostly for the great resource it generates for our compost piles. So anywhere I house chickens I lay out tons of carbon rich materials right on the floor. All of my coops have open floors to the ground under them, so there is access to whatever soil life there might be. I throw straw, shredded paper, sawdust, fall leaves etc. in mass and then make sure to throw scratch grains out often. This gets the chickens scratching, which turns the manure into the carbon mix and we have virtually no smell as a result of this approach. Its a great system....but it generates the dust storm mentioned before if you don't keep the whole thing slightly damp and when its freezing outside, that's hard to do.
It was for this reason that the old chain link gate had to be replaced with a new wall across the middle of the coop. If I was going to try and grow food in this space, I had to try and find a way to keep the dust in check to some extent so the seedlings and plants weren't dusted daily when the chickens were present at least until they move out into their summer homes. I scrounged around and found some old metal roofing that would make a perfect, water proof wall and within an afternoon had a functional wall that would at least offer a chance at keeping the dust in check.
I am working on a short video of this project and once I have it uploaded, I will be sure to get it posted here as well. As always, there is more information over at our original web site which you can view here
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