Saturday July 14, 2018 Guerneville CA.
Simple is best
After watching the chicks use the new simple to make feeder yesterday, I decided to make a couple more of them. The chicks just seemed to take to this simple design.
But I didn’t have any more four inch PVC pipe, but I thought I knew where there was a piece over by my brother’s garden, so I walked over to look for the pipe.
Armstrong Valley Farm
Here’s one of my brother’s gardens where I should be able to find a piece of pipe.
Constructed two more chicken feeders
I found the piece of pipe and was able to make a four foot and a two foot feeder. I cut the bottoms off two more gallon paint cans for the bottom dishes.
Here’s the finished feeders.
They are super easy to construct. Drill three holes and put in three sheet metal type screws setting the dish off from the bottom of the pipe about a quarter inch or so.
Here’s what it looks like from the dish top. Some people use a larger pipe size cap for the dish, ,but I like this height better, but lots of things would work for the dish.
Hanging up the feeder
I drilled two holes near the top and put some steel wire in them and hung them from another piece of steel wire that is also used to adjust the feeder height. Since I have chicks the feeders are fairly low to the ground for now. I only installed one of todays feeders in this spot.
Here’s the feeders in action, notice chicks are using all three of the feeders.
I’m still not sure how I feel about the center feeder as it was harder to build and the chicks took longer to figure out how to use it, but they are using it so I will continue to test it out.
Simpler design has some advantages
You can see the chicks do use the other type of feeder, but only two can use it at a time. The simpler feeder can have five or six chicks feeding as you can see in the back one.
More van prep
Toward evening I started putting some more stuff in my van and just in general getting it ready to go. Just a bit more to go tomorrow and it will be ready to roll on Monday.
Another nice day.