We'd made a first attempt at a chicken tractor using some of the leftover wood from the house. Apparently the previous owner delighted in building cabinets out of plywood, and then painting the cabinets, once completed, in thick layers of brown paint. Thus all unwittingly he provided us with building materials for chicken shelters.
The result was a beast. Parts of the wood were halfway disintegrated with rotted ends that had to be sawed off before they could be worked with. Some of the boards split when they were nailed and had to be shored up with other pieces of wood. And all the wood had many, many nails which we had to pull out. At the end, we had a chicken tractor, but it is heavy, looks like Frankenstein, and can fit maybe four chicken.
The second attempt was using CPVC piping - the plastic water pipes you can get at the hardware store. L saw that the pipes can be flexed into half-circles, and so we got several 8-foot lengths of half-inch CPVC and a few fittings and put them together into a hoop house. Total cost: around $20, with a few hours to saw the piping to size and glue it all together.
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| Our Frankenstein chicken tractor in the foreground, and the hoop house we made out of PVC piping in the background (before being covered). |
The hoop house wobbled around somewhat, and one of the pieces of piping kept popping out of the fitting, but it was quite light. We covered it in plastic and positioned it overtop of a pile of chicken manure that we wanted to compost faster, keeping it in place with a few bricks.
Then disaster struck. The cold came, and the wind blast, and the snow fell. We woke up to find our hoop house at the other end of the property, ripped apart.
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| The remains of the hoop house, once we'd found them at the other end of the yard. |
On to attempt number 3. This time, we built in wood. The design came to me in a daydream - I wanted to find a shape that would minimize the amount of building material and cuts to be made, but would also be sturdy and reasonably easy to put together. The answer was to build two equilateral triangles and connect them to form a prism. The wood was 2-by-3 inch studs to form the triangles, with 1-by-3 lumber connecting them to form the longitudinal sides of the prism. All the lumber was sold in eight foot lengths, so we kept that as the length of each side.
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| The Prism, attempt number 3 for a greenhouse/chicken tractor. |
To form an equilateral triangle, the ends of each stud had to be cut at a 30-degree angle, which is tricky to do with hand tools. Fortunately, a friend with a table saw helped us out. Total cost: also around $20, surprisingly - those eight-foot studs were only $2.15 apiece at the Home Depot. The carpentry took rather longer than the work for the hoophouse design, though. It feels sturdy, and while it's not light, two people can easily carry it around.
We just finished putting the plastic on to turn it into a greenhouse. We have freezing rain here tonight, so we'll see if it survives until morning!
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| The Prism, standing in glory in a field of ice. |
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