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| "Buffy" setting in the nesting box. |
Our nesting boxes were gifted to me by a friend, which makes them extra special. She retrieved them from her aunt's old vintage hen house. This is a simply constructed box with four compartments, two face boards to form the frontals of the nests, and two perches for the hens to use for support when entering the nests.
Since this relic was old and dirty, we gave it a good power-washing and disinfected it with a natural enzyme disinfectant to kill off any mites, lice, fleas or ticks that may have settled in. (We used Manna Pro Poultry Protector.) We left the boxes out in the sun to thoroughly dry out, and then we screwed them onto the wall of our hen house.
We filled the nests with straw and sprinkled them with diatomaceous earth, which is safe for chickens but effectively controls all sorts of pesty bugs, such as cockroaches, ants, earwigs, silverfish, fleas, crickets, millipedes and centipedes. We also sprinkle DE on the floor of the hen house.
Since hens like their privacy when laying eggs, I made curtains for the boxes out of old vintage seed bags. I cut them to a suitable length and hemmed them on a sewing machine so that the hens wouldn't get their feet caught in any frayed edges.
I like vintage. I like re-purposing old things. I like "free." And I really like my chickens!
