When fowls are kept in the confinement of houses and yards an important
question is how to keep the yards sweet. The ground becomes tainted
in a couple of years or so, and then is a fruitful source of disease.
Unless grass can be kept growing so as to keep the ground free from
the poison of the droppings there is no alternative but to change the
ground. It is well to have two runs, using each alternately, and by
planting the one vacated with some quick-growing crop it can be made
ready for occupancy again in a few weeks. An excellent crop for this
purpose is Dwarf Essex Rape, which makes one of the best summer-green
foods for fowls confined to houses and yards; or such garden crops as
squashes, melons, etc., can be grown. After these rye or oats can be
sown, to furnish green food in the fall.
It is a comparatively simple proposition to have the yards divided
into two sections, by setting the house in the middle, having half (or
two-fifths or three-fifths) of the length of yards north of the house;
these north yards being used three or four months in summer, a crop of
some suitable kind being grown in the vacant yards south of the house
in the meantime.
[Illustration: FIG. 15—Illustrates double yards for a continuous
poultry house.]
In Fig. 17 we give a plan for such house and yards. In this plan we
suppose the yards to be one hundred and twenty-five feet long by
eighteen wide, and have placed fifty feet of length of yards north
of the house and seventy-five feet of length south of it. There are
lift-off gates next to the house in the fence south of the house, the
second gate in illustration being shown as lifted off and leaning
against the next panel of fence. These gates give access to all the
yards, for plowing, harrowing, and cultivating a crop; also for driving
up to the front of the pen with a cart to haul away the fouled earth
of the floor of the house. The usual access to these yards is through
the house itself and a gate opening out of the scratching-shed; for
ordinary visits to the north yards there are small, swinging gates next
to the house, and then lift-gates which will admit a team for plowing,
etc. There should be a row of fruit trees set in each yard, to give the
needed shade, and the trees give the owner a second source of profit.
[Illustration: FIG. 16—Dr. Bricault’s “New Idea” poultry house.]
Desiring a poultry house which would give closed pens or could be
opened up to admit the air and sunshine at will, Dr. C. Bricault,
Andover, Mass., adapted the well-known “Dutch Door” to his purpose,
putting the door in the middle of the front of each pen, and so
arranging it that the whole door could be open day and night, in warm
weather, or the lower half of the door shut and the top half open, or
the top half could be closed by a curtain in quite cold weather, and
in severe storms the whole door closed. The size of the pens are ten
by twelve feet, the frame and building plan being substantially the
same as in the preceding house-plan, the doors in the front of each
partition giving a passage through the entire length of the house.
There are two windows in the front of each pen; the roosts are set up
against the partitions between the pens, and the trap-nests are set on
a platform against the north wall. The building is covered with a cheap
sheathing paper, then with sheathing quilt, then Neponset Red Rope
Roofing; a better construction would be Paroid Roofing on the roof and
Neponset on the sides.
[Illustration: FIG. 17—Interior of pen.]
Fig. 17 gives an interior view of one of the pens showing roosts and
trap-nests.