62 
HOUSE AND GARDEN 
March, 1912 
Build your New 
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(Continued irom page 58) 
For just about four weeks, in late 
March and early April, I do not dare to 
put young chickens out of doors in the 
latitude of Massachusetts, and I have no 
room in my coop, with its one compart¬ 
ment for layers and one for sitters. 
In this emergency I have recourse to an 
unused wagon shed, quite near the house. 
It is open at the south side, and has an 
earthen floor; but it can be made warm 
with litter, and the sun shines into it beau¬ 
tifully, while a tight roof keeps off rain or 
snow. 
As soon after the middle of April as the 
weather turns warm, I dare to put even 
the smallest chickens into their shelter- 
pens in the open field. By this time rats 
are active in sheds, having young families 
of their own for which to provide, and 
they esteem downy chickens a toothsome 
morsel to take home for the family dinner. 
The open field is therefore safer from rats 
than a position near a barn or shed, and it 
is also safer from vermin of smaller size 
than a position next the hen coop. 
In the open, then, I have built shelter 
pens of plank, walled and roofed with tin, 
forty feet long by four feet wide, and open 
on the south side. Board partitions divide 
this strongly-built shelter into four parts, 
each ten feet long. The open south side 
of each adjoins a pen ten feet square, en¬ 
closed upon three sides by a twelve-inch 
board set into the ground and surmounted 
by two feet of fine wire net. Each pen 
holds fifty chickens, and keeps them safe 
from cats, dogs, rats and hawks. 
At first I allow two hens to each pen, 
and they squabble more or less, steal each 
other’s chickens and keep up a constant 
grumbling and complaining. Still, they 
do no actual harm, kill no chickens, and 
are really necessary to hover the brood at 
night. When the nights grow mild, one 
hen to each pen will answer, and by the 
middle of June they are better off without 
any. 
The chickens stay in these pens until 
they are big enough to fly out, about the 
first of August. I find it is much better 
for young chicks not to have a wide range. 
The death rate is much higher where they 
are permitted to run at large. 
They have fresh water in shallow trays, 
two or three times a day. They eat a dry 
mash of several grains, so that their food 
never sours, and there is always plenty for 
them to eat. They have shade, sunshine, 
shelter from wind and rain, fresh earth 
for scratching, green grass and weeds and 
space enough for exercise. 
After the first of August the netting is 
taken down and they run where they will 
and live upon whole corn and fresh water. 
In the autumn I select the fifty best-look¬ 
ing pullets to keep, sell off the others with 
the old hens and all the cockerels, buy two 
well-bred cockerels of different strain but 
the same breed, and move my feathere^l 
family into winter quarters on November 
ist. 
Katharine Keife 
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