Building our hen house

We have been progressively changing our backyard to a vegetable garden and early this year we were given two Hyline hens.  They are very tame and the grandchildren love them.  My husband and I built a chook pen using fly wire doors as our fencing.  It has worked really well.  My sister-in-law Nola has now given me two more Silkies (one black and the other white).  I love having hens as there is no waste with food scraps and they faithfully give us eggs every day.  We have two fruit trees in the chook pen - a mandarin tree and a nectarine tree.  I was having trouble with the crows stealing the eggs so I have put two mosquito nets over the top of the pen and this has solved the problem.  The trees are starting to get fruit on them so it will also help keep them safe from other birds stealing the fruit.

I love thinking of ways to repurpose and recycle pallet wood and anything else that can be reused.  The hen house is a dog kennel and my sister Patty and I built a base for it from pallet wood.  Inside the hen house I have put long black trays on the floor and I put hay as the flooring.  I have also built two laying boxes out of recycled wood.  The house has a perch up high.  The hens seem to poop at night time.  Each week I remove the black tray (see picture) and tip the hay and poop into the compost tumbler and it all eventually breaks down into a great mulch for the garden.
We have now put an archway over the gate and by the end of summer the jasmine creeper should have grown over the top of the archway.