The Chicken Coop in the Backyard

This is the chicken coop with the red door on the left side of the rabbitry. The floor area is 6 feet wide by 10 feet long by 7 feet tall. This gives me a total floor area of 60 square feet inside the chicken coop which is good for 10 medium sized chickens. The recommended floor space per chicken of medium breed is 8-10 square feet of space inside the coop, if the chickens are to be confined for long periods of time. Since I only have 1 native hen of medium size and 5 young native pullets that are even smaller, the space inside the chicken coop is more than enough for them. The front of the chicken coop and its right side wall facing the rabbit's side is enclosed with a wire mesh. So there is a free flow of air inside the whole building from the rabbitry to the chicken coop side. Since this is the onset of the rainys season here in the Philippines, we will have to cover the front wall of the chicken coop with clear plastic material so the rain water will not go inside. There is still a free flow for air circulation inside because part of the wall on the left side of the coop is also covered with wire mesh material.

The Rabbits

These are my breeding stocks. I lost a female New Zealand doe with the red eyes just 3 days ago for some unknown reason. That's her in the picture at the top with the red eyes. She was doing okay the night before but the next morning, she was looking lethargic and would not eat anything. We brought her inside the house and tried to give her some water and tempted her to eat some carrots but she still would not eat. I was going to bring her to the clinic that morning but was told that the vet won't be in until 2 in the afternoon. We called another vet listed in the telephone directory but unfortunately, he was also on field. So we asked if he could drop by our house to check on our sick rabbit, that was 11 AM. By around lunchtime, that rabbit passed away, just like that! I felt so devastated because I could not find anything wrong with her and I felt helpless not knowing what to do because it happened so fast.

 So now, I have only three does left, one New Zealand mixed breed and one Cinnamon mixed breed and one Chinchilla mixed breed. The spotted white and brown buck is a mixed breed of Chinchilla and Cinnamon, he was born on December  15, 2011. The black buck is a mixed breed of New Zealand and Chinchilla breed, he was born on January 02, 2011, barely 6 months old. Baguio City's elevation is at 5,000 feet above sea level and it is usually cool up here but lately, the weather during this summer has been hot. So what we do to make the rabbits feel more comfortable is to give them some iced water bottles. We fill up several 1-litter plastic soda bottles with tap water and freeze them at night. In the mornings, we give these frozen bottles to the rabbits. They would stretch out on their full length on the wire floor and lie down right next to the frozen bottles to keep themselves cool.  They usually spend a lot of time sleeping during the daytime but they are active during the late afternoon when it's almost supper time. We give them more greens and feeds at night because that's when they like to stay up and just keep on eating.

The Rabbitry

We re-purposed the old pigsty in the backyard to become a tiny house for our rabbits and chickens. The top picture is now the rabbitry part and it houses 2 bucks and 3 does, these are my breeding stocks. We kept a lot of  scrap GI sheet materials in the old run-down pigsty knowing that these may come in handy someday. I'm glad that we didn't throw these away because we used them all up in building the rabbit hutches.

We made a two-tier steel frame rabbit hutch with two hanging cages on each level. The bottom picture shows the steel frame inside the doorway. Under the cages on each level, we made a slanted floor made out of scrap GI sheet materials and then  covered these with cheap linoleum. The bottom of the slanted floor has a pvc pipe that was cut in half and this serves as a gutter. The wastes and urine that falls down on the slanted floor goes to this gutter and then it goes to a bucket with a strainer. This strainer serves as a screen to separate the urine from the wastes materials. The urine drains into a pvc pipe that goes into the creek and this leaves the wastes behind which is then taken out and put in a closed bin with earthworms on it.

All of our 4 cages are made of all-wire welded wire mesh material. The size of each breeding cage is 2.5 feet wide by 3 feet long by 18 inches tall. Based on the numerous research that I've done on the internet, this is the ideal space for a medium sized breeding doe and her litters as it can accomodate a nest box. Since I have only four cages at the moment, I placed 2 rabbits in each cage. When I bought them, they were only 2 months old and I thought it would make them feel better if they had company. I will be separating each of them soon after we finish making the rest of the cages. I plan to start breeding them by mid July as they will be 18 weeks by then.

The Old Pigsty in the Backyard

Growing up with four siblings from a poor family, my late parents has always had some small animals in the backyard to supplement their meager income and put food on the table. They kept a few sows and raised the litters for fattening until they reached maturity age at about 8-9 months and then they were sent to the market. The money they made out of the sale of the pigs were then used to send us four siblings to school.

The first picture at the top is just one of the four compartments in the old pigsty in the backyard. We tore down the other three compartments some years ago when the city passed a law, prohibiting the raising of pigs in the city. This last compartment was kept for storage purposes only. We had some things that we didn't want to throw away, thinking that they might come in handy in the future and so we just kept them in this old pigsty. The picture in the center is the same pigsty but this was taken from another angle to show the sayote plants growing on the rooftop. The size of this pigsty is 6 feet wide by 10 feet long by 6 feet high infront and it slopes down to 5 feet at the back. The original size of the whole structure was 10 feet wide by 24 feet long and divided into four compartments. The bottom picture shows the construction materials that we purchased such as gravel and some sand for the renovation project. It has been more than a decade since we last raised some pigs in the backyard. We wanted to raise some small animals again but since hog raising is no longer allowed, so we are going into rabbits and chickens.