08/20/2018
I've been planning and collecting repurposed and on sale material for this project for over a year now. We started this Rabbit/Chicken House project February of 2018 and on the evening of August 19,2018 we turned a corner by completing the roof. Having the roof in place made it possible for us to get the rabbit cages installed and begin moving the rabbits into their new digs.This is our 2nd Rabbit / Chicken House build. This new housing will be dedicated to Rabbits with synergy offered by Chickens and Ducks. We will be suspending rabbits in wire hutches and have chickens forage and scratch below therefore stirring up all the dust that they want to. At The Peaceful Glen Homestead we practice what we teach, self-resilience through design. One of the design practices we employ is known as "function stacking". Function stacking is simply using natural systems to create symbiosis and synergies that are beneficial to each other. Our first chicken house was a design established by Bill Mollison. The purpose of that design was a totally off-grid application possibly in an emerging society situation. Mollison's design is a greenhouse / chicken house combination where the livestock are supposed to provide heat and nutrient for the plants, which follows the concept of function stacking. What I discovered in this design is, chickens create a lot of dust in a closed area and rabbits shed a lot of hair and those two things combined really create a mess around and in a greenhouse. Too much dust will actually clog up the stoma on the leaves of a plant, preventing the exchange of oxygen and release of carbon dioxide in the plant.
The desired outcome in building another separate housing structure is to provide a cleaner less dusty, hairy environment for plants to grow and thrive in our greenhouse by moving all chickens and rabbits into the new house then doing some housekeeping in the greenhouse. We will fill the space originally used for chickens and rabbits with quail. Quail are easier to manage in this type of enclosed space. The Quail will live in suspended cages allowing their droppings to fall to the dirt floor below, making it easier to remove their waste from the space and transport to the compost pile.
Most of the material used, so far, has been scavenged and repurposed. All said and done we will likely have 35% repurposed material and the rest will be purchased at greatly reduced prices.
- 4" steel conduit corner posts, scavenged from a commercial gutter downspout demolition
- 15" ceramic faced block left over from a project that was built 50 years ago and just laying in a pile in someone's back field
- framing lumber from the demolition of a 40 yr old shed and an old horse shed
- metal roofing material, huge firesale type discounts
So, get out there and make friends and let people know what you are doing. Let them know what you need. Folks want to be connected with this type of effort. In these photos you will see a long time friend, Russell, who has helped me with most of my projects and the young man is, Joseph, whom I have been on a mentoring track with for the recent 4 years. Then there is Randy, a very close friend of ours who is the ultimate construction pro. If you are looking for an excellent Homesteading / Farming experience then come on out to The Peaceful Glen and get your hands dirty. I am always looking for interns or people interested in learning more about a resilient lifestyle, catch up with me sometime.
