If you have purchased a sticker or decal from us through our Etsy store or another source, the first time can be a bit confusing. Most custom stickers with multiple sections come with transfer tape. Here’s how to install one:
This is how your sticker looks with the transfer tape. The tape is stuck onto the face of the sticker.
Peel the backing off the back of the sticker leaving the vinyl decal in place on the transfer tape. This picture has the adhesive side of the decal facing up. Note that the image is reversed because it is being viewed from the bottom or back.
Apply the sticker on whatever you’re placing it on….in this instance, we are placing it on a car window.
Using a credit card or some other kind of scraper rub the decal onto the mounting surface working out sir bubbles.
Now we can peel the transfer tape off and leave the decal in place.
Check out our stickers and other designs at our Etsy shop….
If you have chickens around your house, you probably know about mealworms. These crunchy dried worms are the secret (along with fresh fruit) in getting chickens to do what we want them to! If the birds get out of the yard, or in the garden somehow, mealworms will grab their attention and they will come a-running!
Mealworms….chicken crack.
Check out a short video of our girls going nuts for mealworms:
When temperatures start to soar in the summer, you need to find ways to keep your chickens cool. Make sure there is plenty of water available to your girls. High moisture treats like watermelon can go a long way to cool off chickens. When it gets really hot, I start using the freezer to help keep the chickens happy. One thing our birds like is frozen corn. I’ll take a can of corn and empty it into a piece of tupperware, freeze it and pop it out and give it to the birds. It takes a while to get a piece of corn, but helps cool them off and keeps them occupied. Ice cubes in their water helps quite a bit. Lately we came up with a unique and easy way to implement this by freezing their water bottle…
Cool Off Your Chickens With A Freezable Waterer
We have a bunch of nipple waterers for the chickens all over the yard. Their main source of water is a gravity fed system that I posted instructions to here. In addition to this we have smaller individual bottles here and there. It seems like the birds almost prefer the individual bottles outside the run. One of the easiest things to do is to get a plastic bottle of water and install the poultry nipple in the actual bottle cap, drill a hole on the bottom of the bottle and hang it upside down. I like to hang these in bicycle water bottle holders mounted in various places. Here’s a few pictures:
Here’s the sweet part….we have a few bottles and use a regular bottle cap and freeze a half full bottle of water. Make sure the water doesn’t leak out the hole in the bottom while it freezes, pull the frozen bottle out of the freezer and switch the cap to the nipple cap. Top the bottle off with water and you’re good to go!
I’m not sure what to call this-a poultry waterer, pvc waterer, gravity fed pvc waterer, automatic chicken waterer? How about we just call it a chicken waterer with some nice advantages…
After raising chickens for a while, most people realize the benefit of getting the waterer off the ground of the chicken coop. By having the water source above your chicken’s head, the water stays cleaner (no poop or bedding in the water) and doesn’t get knocked over and all over the coop. Almost all chickens can be trained to use a poultry nipple waterer-a screw in nozzle found at most feed stores that screws into pvc pipe or the bottom of a plastic bucket and lets water flow when the nozzle is pecked at. Chickens are attracted to the bright red color and learn how to use them in no time. I installed a gravity fed watering system for our birds that uses poultry nipples in pvc pipe being fed from a food grade 3 gallon bucket. It holds enough water for several days at least and has the advantage of being able to disassemble completely for cleaning.
Chicken Waterer Parts List
For this project I used:
2 nipple waterers (enough for 6 birds)
3/4 inch pvc pipe
3/4 inch pvc endcap
3/4 inch pvc threaded connector
Pvc cement
Food grade square bucket with lid
Threaded brass faucet
A bulkhead fitting
A section of garden hose and threaded fittings
teflon tape
All my couplers were 3/4 inch to accommodate standard garden hoses. The bucket I used was square which made for an easy installation of the bulkhead on the vertical sidewall. I’m not too sure if mounting the bulkhead/faucet assembly on the side wall would work on a standard 5 gallon bucket because of the curve of the bucket. You could mount it on the flat bottom of the bucket if you had a way to hang the bucket from above. Through researching food grade buckets online, I discovered that all plastic containers labeled HDPE are food grade. This can ease your mind if you can’t verify if a container is food grade or not.
Chicken Waterer Assembly
I used a drill press at my work to cut the appropriate hole in the bucket with a large paddle bit. After marking the pipe, I drilled the holes for the screw in poultry nipples. The drill press and a sharp brad point drill bit allowed me to get the holes and consequently the nipples in line.
I used a bolt with the same basic thread pitch as the nipples to start a thread in the holes of the pvc pipe. Once I could start the poultry nipple in the pvc, I wrapped the threads with some teflon tape and screwed them into the pvc pipe with a crescent wrench:
After gluing the end fittings on with the pvc glue, the actual watering assembly was complete:
The bulkhead basically screws in place:
A little teflon tape and the faucet gets screwed onto the bulkhead:
I cut a section of garden hose and attached the appropriate couplers and basically screwed the whole thing together.
I wired up the pipe in the coop temporarily since our chickens aren’t full grown yet. When they are all grown, I’ll make a more permanent mounting system. I placed the bucket on a cinder block so it was higher than the pipe and let gravity do its thing:
Here is a link to my previous post on the chicken coop. There second video contains a quick shot of the waterer in action. Our coop is coming along nicely and we are enjoying every minute of it!
We’ve talked about raising chickens at our house on and off for years now. Every spring, the subject comes up around Easter. As I became more aware of the health benefits of pastured eggs, I started to seriously consider raising chickens in my backyard. Besides access to the healthiest eggs I could get, we’ve heard stories from other chicken raising friends of how rewarding raising chickens can be.
We had an old outdoor birdcage with a cedar shake roof in the backyard that I thought we might be able to repurpose into a coop. After checking it out, the roof was the only thing worth saving and a coop was designed around the existing roof. We decided on a condo style coop-a 2 level coop with a roosting area above an enclosed run. An additional enclosed run would be added onto the structure at a later date before our chickens were full grown. To conserve space, I decided upon an exterior nesting box for our birds to lay their eggs in. As the coop was nearing completion, it was time to get some chicks…
Backyard Chickens:Baby Chicks In The Brooder
In early April we brought home five baby chicks. We settled upon three Rhode Island Reds and two Golden Sexlinks. These should be good all around birds in terms of personality, adaptability to weather and very productive egg layers. We kept them inside in a makeshift brooder consisting of a large storage tote with a hardware cloth lid. After about a week, we transitioned to pine shavings for bedding inside our brooder and quickly moved to a hanging feeder and waterer. For the first week, the chicks were on paper towels and clean up was quick and easy. Once we transitioned to pine shavings, they got everywhere including in the water and food. Chicken poop started getting in these as well. I made a hanging waterer out of a nalgene bottle and a nipple waterer you can find at feed stores. Getting your birds’ food and water off the ground is essential from all I’ve read and it really helps cut down on extra cleaning and refilling.
Our cat loved watching the babies…
The Coop Gets Finished
After several weeks, it was obvious the chicks were going to need to go out in the coop before they got all their feathers since space was starting to become an issue. The night time temperatures were a little too cold for the chicks, so they were going to need a heat lamp at night. I wanted to have an outlet inside our coop eventually for the winter time, but now I was forced to come up with a solution before the coop was inhabited. I ended up running electricity from our garage to the coop and ran conduit inside the coop (no pecking the wires!). I also used totally enclosed plastic housings for the ground fault interrupter receptacle as chicken waste will eventually rot metal housings. To minimize dust at the receptacle, I installed an in-use cover. We painted the coop to match the house, and I installed a beautiful fused glass window in the door to the coop that Mrs. Wellinformedliving had made. Here’s a picture of the finished coop:
A close up of the art glass window:
A view from inside the coop:
Here’s a view of the inside, you can see the GFCI on the left, one of the roosts in the back and one of the water bottle waterers.
And the coop at night:
The chicks have been in their new home for several weeks now and have adapted quite well. They have learned to use the ramp between levels and their new gravity feed watering system. As they grow and get older we’ll remove the heat lamp and give them some outside free range time each day. All in all this has been an extremely rewarding experience so far.
