New Chicken/Garden Shed

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The largest building project on the homestead this summer has been the new chicken/garden shed.  My husband had shoulder surgery at the end of March so he was unable to help much.  Don't get me wrong, I love to build things, but sometimes a second set of hands comes in real handy.  He was able to help me with the roof a little.  We built a platform from a pallet and strapped it to the forks of the tractor.  I rode the platform while he operated the tractor to lift me up and down while I hauled up the metal pieces and screwed them down.

The blue barrel will be our watering system.  I have gutter to attach and it will drain into the barrel.  The barrel will be attached to the black tubing you see coming out of the building.  This is currently hooked up to a hose up at the house but I would rather use the rain to feed the automatic watering system that is attached on the pasture side of the building.

One end of the 8 x 16 foot building is the housing for our meat birds and the other is a garden shed.  This building is between the house and the garden so it is a perfect place for me to keep all my garden tools etc.  Right now they are in a shed that is located on the other side of the house from the garden.

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This year we are raising Red Rangers on pasture for meat.  We had such a great loss last year with the Cornish Cross that we had raised the past 20 years that we decided to try something new this year.  So far we have only lost 3 of the 40 birds that we started with.  The big test will be how they dress out when we butcher them in a couple of weeks.  There is a second batch of chicks coming from the hatchery about the time we butcher these.  They should be ready for the freezer sometime in September.  As I said we are raising them on pasture with the woven electric fence.  I can move the fence when the area they are in starts to get a little beat up.  I don't want the birds to take the pasture down to bare ground so I move them as necessary.  The grass grows back very well since it has been fertilized :).  I'll let you know how these dress out for us.

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