Keeping backyard chickens is beneficial for your garden, fun and educational for children and they give you “free” free range eggs.
Being the proud owners of 3 bantam chooks, we wanted to find the cheapest and easiest way to give them a safe and low maintenance house without spending hundreds of dollars. So my wife came up with a plan to use our old cockatoo cage with a bird aviary that my neighbor put out on his verge pickup.
To start with I chose a level site in a sunny position. Then I got an old cockatoo cage and grinded the back, top and bottom off it to create the run area on the sand. I built a small wood extension at the base with a hinged lid for easy access to the laying boxes. Next, I put down concrete slabs and placed the new bird aviary on top of the slabs butting it up against the open end (top) of the run cage.
I used pliers to cut an opening for access to the run area and then secured both cages together with wire. The upright cage has a roosting post and having the slabs underneath makes it very easy to clean.
We fill the run area with fresh straw every month and the old straw and chicken poo goes straight to the compost. To deter the flies we planted herbs around the cage including rue and santolina and woodruff.
Most of the scraps from the kitchen go to the chooks but we also buy 4 x 25kg bags of premium poultry mix each year. We often let the chooks out of the cage while we work in the garden and they walk around and clean up the bugs and turn over the green waste compost for us.
Chickens make excellent pets and they help turn your house hold kitchen scraps into manure for the compost and garden and provide you with the best eggs you've ever tasted.
Thanks for reading guys
RR
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