The chickens don’t seem to notice the cold at all. Every morning right now I have to go out with the kettle to defrost their water supply, which had a good inch and a half of ice in the top at the weekend.
The worst part of it is the nozzles at the bottom that the chickens peck at to make the water drip out. These are always damp, and as they’re exposed to the air just a foot or so above ground level they seem to freeze very easily and need a good stream of hot water pouring over them to free up.
The chickens seem to be oblivious to all of this and merrily leap out of their coop in the morning to see what vegetable offcuts we’ve scattered about the run. They spend the rest of the day strolling around scratching the ground, grubbing in the earth and pecking at that slowly refreezing water dispenser.
And with good reason. I’m reading Hen Keeping: Inspiration and Practical Advice for Would-be Smallholders
at the moment, which is proving to be the best chicken-keeping book I’ve read so far (full review coming, but in short it’s the one book I wish we’d had before we bought our little flock) and it talks very casually of egg production dropping by 25% only once the temperature of the coop – not the run – gets to -12 degrees Celsius or lower.
That’s very cold.
If they can happily put up with that, though, the -2.5 to -4 degrees we’ve been experiencing on and off these last couple of weeks must seem almost tropical.
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That was helpfull because we have only had the odd egg out of 3 hens for the last few weeks,and now suddenly we are back up to 3 aday.A helpfull tip is i line the bottom of the coop with layers of newspapers/magazines to help insulate,and plenty of straw.i gave up with the poultry drinker in the icy weather.its easier to use an old bowlof some sort.empty it out at night to prevent it freezing overnight.
I’m starting to learn the benefits of keeping hold of a lot of old newspapers. We already use shredded paper as insulation for the nesting box, which the chickens have taken to well, and we use several sheets opened out in the droppings trays to make them easier to clean each week. My grandmother used to have a stack of papers that reached from floor to ceiling and filled a room that was about six feet square on our chicken farm. I never understood why back then, but I do now.
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