Tia is looking quite beautiful in this shot don’t you think? .
It poured with rain yesterday. POURED!
It was an inside day for everyone.
I have been having trouble with a group of layers who want to sleep in the laying boxes. It is not the sleeping that is the problem it is the fresh manure that piles up in the corners of the boxes every night, making the early eggs dirty and needing cleaning every day and I was replacing the bedding in the boxes every day and that was becoming unsustainable. I only have a certain number of straw bales. Every cent is accounted for this winter.
I put the box chickens back up on their roosts every night and they just flutter about and cry and then return to the boxes. So I looked about for something new to put in the boxes. Applying my new system – stop complaining and fix it or ADAPT. I have found these laying mats. They are made of plastic, looking like long haired door mats and are easy to clean with a good shake.
The mats have been in the chook house for two days now. I cannot change the unwelcome visitors but I can create an easy way to clean up after them. Chickens hate new things. But they laid fourteen eggs on the clean mats – a new high for this time of year – and much to my surprise, last night there were no chickens sleeping in the boxes, not when I checked anyway.
Yesterday I also caught four more of the wild chickens, who lay anywhere they like, and popped them in with the old layers, this is causing a ruckus in the chook house also. Possibly contributing to the box sleepers deciding to stick with their mates on the ample roosts. So part of my fixing it was to make some noise apparently. 
Because they have started laying early, (usually by now we are down to one or no eggs a day), I must follow their lead and I have put on their extra daytime light to jump start the rest. This year I put cold bulbs into the heat lamp holders and hung them. What is interesting is that the chickens stick to those pools of light scratching about and doing their busy work right under the lights. So when, in the past, I thought they were gravitating to the warmth, it was actually the light that attracted them – these modern light bulbs have no warmth at all.
You can see from the image above that their wall window is half open due to the warm weather – this natural light (though no sun) and the warm winter has contributed to the egg count. It will be interesting to see what happens when the real winter cold comes – and it will come.
Just not today. Today we are going for a high of 47F/8C. Another NZ winters day on the prairies of Illinois. Rainy and foggy with lots of mud. But I cannot change the weather or maybe I can. I figure – if it took two hundred years to change the weather patterns, it will take two hundred years to heal them. I don’t care what the nay sayers say, I am leaving them blubbering in their corners, I am working on my corner now. I am an optimist. I have happy pebbles. So I am going to plant more and more trees (my healing of choice), and combine my feed runs in the big truck into one trip each fortnight and adapt to the changes that have been wrought so far.
Plus as you know I fly a lot in the winter which is another cross against my footprint count so I have even more trees to plant! The Fellowship Forest is going to be magnificent. I will focus on native fruit trees again this year and oaks and mulberries. (You are most welcome to plant a tree here too if you have no space at your place). And this year one huge plot of wild native flowers and grasses is going in for the bees and butterflies. I will sow piles of milkweed which will drive the croppers around here crazy! They like everything mowed and tidy and spray any flowering weeds they see. They hate milkweed. Then we wonder where the butterflies and bees have gone! They are slow to adapt but I am not.
I hope I have a good group of woofers this year – we have work to do!
The sun must come back one day. Not today though. I remind myself that cloudy days are good for the skin.
I hope you have a lovely day.
love celi
The Kitchen's Garden 
59 responses to “Mats for chooks”
We have a pollinator plot in our community garden, lots of milkweed, joe pye, columbine-blooms early, I think it has helped attract more butterflies and bees to the garden. I hope you will take pictures of your wildflowers this summer. I wonder why someone buys eggs at the farmers market if they are concerned about chicken poop?! Just go to the store and get the commercially raised, processed, cleaned ones! Hope you have a good weekend!
I will take pictures but I think it will take a while to get established. There are a lot of weeds up there that will need pulling. I have a plan though..
Some of our hens sleep in the nesting boxes as well; I will have to remember those laying mats once we have the flock replenished in the spring. The two remaining hens (after the bobcat massacre) are roosting on their ladder like good girls.
That bobcat story still gives me the shivers – c
Come autumn …and cooler days….I’ll be planting trees. My front yard is a huge expanse of lawn, too much to mow and the house needs shading from the early morning sun that roasts everything. I plan to have lots of natives that will provide food and shelter, maybe a few more fruit trees and lots of pretty flowering scented trees, plus small under-stories for small birds and lizards. It’ll be a front yard habitat garden to replenish my little corner. We each have to do our bit and eventually the dots of replenishment will spread and connect around the world.
What a great idea – open lawn is not a natural state – we seldom find open spaces like that in nature unless it is desert. Do you think? I can’t think of any.. c
I could be completely ignorant, but weren’t the American prairies wide open grass spaces with few trees? I don’t know if that is its natural state or not!
Wow! I had no idea there were so many chicken folk reading your blog! What a great idea about the nesting mats – just told hub about them as, alas, we suffer the same problems. Thanks!
On another note, I wanted to know how can I donate monies to plant a tree in the Friendship Forrest. Please, let me know! Thanks!
If you scroll down you will see the Donate button – you will need paypal – just add a note so i know it is you. And thank you! Some people buy trees online and have them sent to me in the spring. I hope our Fellowship Forest becomes a Fellowship jungle in years to come. c
I love your tree planting!!! That is magnificent!!
Ooo, 8 is toasty warm this time of year! It’s been too warm here in Ireland, too. But tonight it is down to below 3, so perfect for free chilling of my weekend libations!
I have a very tiny garden. I have one tree – a local weed-tree called a grey willow. I don’t have room for anything else big, and anywhere I could plant one would block my precious sunshine. I would be over the moon if you could plant a tree for me. Anything native.
Tia is looking quite sublime in the elegant blue color of light….I planted lots of milkweed in my teensy deer fenced veggie/flower garden . Hopefully they will return next spring!
Have a stupendous lovely day!
I read an old English saying the other day, that said that if Candlemas is clear and bright, the coldest part of winter is still to come. If Candlemas is raining, winter is over. Candlemas is February 2nd. I would be interested to know whether the saying works for America as well (or whether it really is true in England!), and I have been trying to work out what the equivalent date for the Southern Hemisphere is – August 2nd?
We use the same plastic nest mats and they seem to work very well. Our chickens did not have a bit of trouble accepting them… maybe it was just luck!
We don’t have room for many more trees in our yard, although the ones we have added are flowering natives which are bird, butterfly & bee attractive but as well as the vege garden we are building we’re planting a “green manure” mix http://www.mrfothergills.com.au/seeds-vegetables/peas-beans/green-manure-mix.html which we hope the little birds -we have a great population of finches & wrens- butterflies and bees will enjoy as well as building up our soil.
I had a redbud in the front yard, the bees loved it and it was beautiful in the spring. The birds ate the seeds after the pods feel to the ground and opened. I bet my uncle would’ve loved those mats had something like that been available when he had the hatchery all those years ago. Most of the coops he had were floored with layers of chicken wire with a board down the middle so it was possible to get in and get the eggs. I’ve got nothing but concrete, asphalt and gravel here, no place to plant anything except in pots. Hopefully by next spring I’ll be back in a house with a yard.
Happy pebbles, I’m on the lookout for those. I’ll start by putting the blubberer inside me out of the house. Love your
tree idea too.
Now I am on the other side of the pond, I get to your posts so late! Well it is early morning here, but only your post from the day before is there LOL. I just wanted to say I am so glad that against popular opinion that seems now to be banded about in the USA, you are still continuing to do your bit for the environment. Can’t wait to get my new home and do my bit too. However I am real impressed with what the local councils here are insisting on – bins for everything! One for normal rubbish, one for recycle, one for ‘food’ and one for garden waste. And it is law that you put the right thing in the right bin!! The bin for ‘normal’ rubbish is quite light as all the other bins take the majority of our waste, and all those bins are used to put back into a productive way our otherwise rubbish!!
I love that you plant trees! This year my farmstead is teaming up with some other people to try to get a tree planting project going. 🙂 We’re trying to reforest abandoned urban lots in poor neighborhoods in our deep city. We’re hoping to plant native nuts and fruits especially to help provide natural orchards to help feed people and combat food deserts.
In this time of america, cleaning up our corners is more important than ever. Wish us luck!
I’ve often wondered if those laying box mats really work to keep the hens from lingering and loitering and pooping in the nest boxes. Glad to know it seems to help! I’ll check the price next time I’m at the feed store. I’ve got a hen in a nest box every morning and I’d like to discourage that habit before they start laying again – hopefully SOON!