Chicken Coop Designs for Portable Chicken Coop
Portable chicken coop designs are perfect when you have just a few hens that you want to move around your yard. Also known as chicken tractors, these little coops have a small area for roosting, eating, drinking, laying eggs and foraging. Since the coop is moved every few days to a week, your chickens are getting plenty of grass and bugs to supplement their diet.
You may wonder why you would want a portable chicken coop design. Moving the chickens around keeps them safe and secure while giving them new foraging grounds. They can be moved around the yard to eat bugs, and grass. Their droppings can be used as fertilizers to the soil. You can even move some of them onto garden areas at the end of the season so your chickens can glean anything leftover from harvest. They will also fertilize your garden. The droppings will decompose over the winter which can also be used as fertilizers for your garden soil that will allow more luscious products for you. You’d be amazed how chickens that are not moved around can reduce an area down to bare earth in less than a week. Then, it becomes a muddy every time it rains, and your chickens don’t get all that nutritious greenery to eat.
An easy chicken coop design that is portable is the ark. This is an A-frame that is triangular pen with wide base at the bottom and peak at the top. The ark can be made small or large. The only thing that should limit you for size is whether you can move it or not. The ark is made so a third of it is the coop and the other two-thirds is an outdoor run. The coop can hold perches and nest boxes. Small openings allow the chicken out to the run. A door that can allow you to enter easily, placed on the opposite side of the coop, will also allow you to clean, gather fresh eggs and feed the chickens easily. The chicken run has a door at the end so you can easily access. Arks can be moved by attaching long poles so two people can lift and move it, or they can be hooked up to a vehicle and towed.
Another A-frame type portable chicken coop design is a coop that is composed of the top third of the A-frame with the chicken run beneath it. The coop provides shade this way, and the chickens are able to sleep up off the ground in a protected area. It will be easier for you to clean the coop and collect eggs if there are small doors at each end. These coops are generally built to house two to four hens and are moved by hand.
Small portable chicken coop designs can also be imaginative. Build a chicken coop that has wheels for easy moving and so it can be moved even with a single person.
You can make portable runs out of wire or PVC. You can even use a dog house as the coop itself with a few modifications to make it easy to access for egg gathering and cleaning.
