For the first six weeks you have your baby chicks, you will need to keep them in a brooder box. Our chicken journey is also my kids' 4-H projects so they are doing majority of the work. We decided to make our brooder box out of a plastic tote. It was a very quick and easy project.
You will need:
- large plastic tote
- hardware cloth (think extra strong chicken wire)
- zip ties
- saw or sharp blade
- drill
- wire cutters to cut the hardware cloth
- scissors
That's it! Let's get started.
First they cut a hole in the top of the lid.
Then my daughter drilled a few holes around the opening for the zipties to go through.
Then they rolled out and cut the hardware cloth to size.
They looped the zip ties through the hardware cloth and the holes my daughter drilled to attach it together.
That's it! Done!
Here is the final project.
So this worked out great for the first few weeks we had the chicks, but oh my! They grew very quickly, and we ended up need to make another bigger brooder box using the same method with a much larger bin. I'm sure they would've been fine in the first one, but I felt bad that they didn't have a lot of room as they got bigger.
This is what the bigger one looked like. We bought the tote at Home Depot.
And if you are wondering about that awesome shirt my son is wearing, you can find it and other cute chicken shirts in my shop. Of course I had to make chicken shirts for the whole family. Shop chicken apparel now!
