I'm Donna's husband, Dave, making this post. I have to say that, although I wasn't sold on the idea of backyard chickens in the beginning, I am really enjoying them now.
It's been quite awhile since our last post when the chicks were one week old. Since then, they've grown fast, and we've gone through several chicken coop solutions. The dining room table Target storage box brooder worked well for awhile, but the chicks quickly started to outgrow it. We came up with a temporary solution. After seeing some brooders online that were built with PVC pipe, I figured out I could modify my kids' backyard soccer goal into a chicken tractor. The kids so far have not warmed to soccer and never used it, and the size and weight of it was perfect.
This new coop only took a few hours to build, and it worked great. We moved it all around the yard, and the chickies were able to eat lots of grass and bugs and fertilize the lawn, just as I had hoped they would. Our dog Rhett really enjoyed watching them, too. It took him awhile to learn he was supposed to guard them and not eat them, but he soon figured it out.
The soccer tractor turned out to be very portable, and the chickies loved it.
Rhett really enjoyed spending time outdoors with the chicks. The only problem was, we couldn't use it at night, because the raccoons and coyotes would be able to make quick work of the chickens in a temporary shelter like this one. The chicks were clearly outgrowing the dining room table brooder, and getting bigger every day. So, the race to create a permanent coop was on.
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