>It takes about a dozen heavy-breed hens to keep warm enough in the
>winter here;
Common belief denied by the many chicken books I have.
Hmmm. Don't know about 'chicken books' but I lost plenty of gals as I
tried over a period of years to pare down to what I actually needed. Also,
a even dozen of the lighter weight 'modern' breeds doesn't quite cut
it. Other than the Cochins and Orpingtons, Jersey Giants have done the
best for me so far as cold tolerance goes and they lay better than the
others. I've had several of them that laid every other day right through
our puny 7-hour days. I don't run power down there but they do have a nice
big window and I let them out every day unless it's actually nasty. If I
shovel for them (have to shovel down to there anyhow) and give a bit of
scratch they like to come out and spend some time but otherwise they sit in
the anteroom (air lock) doorway in the sun.
I really am not too keen on too many eggs in the winter because they almost
always freeze; I usually only make 3 trips a day down there to take down
warm water and 10 minutes exposed to the air is more than enough to freeze
them to the cracking point through much of the winter. The JGs are lousy
setters, though, so we keep a few of the others. I don't eat chicken so
trade partner does all the culls and takes young birds at fryer stage; she
raises my strawberries in trade for that.
Interesting thing about chickens/freezing; maybe you have noticed it: the
roosters freeze before the hens. Not talking about just combs, but about
those that meet their demise by freezing. For one thing, the hens will be
together on the floor in the deep litter, rooster more likely to stay on
roost bars, but other than that, don't know what factors come into
play. Have had several roosters freeze right in place when they were down
with the hens, though, when all the hens seemed perfectly fine, so guess
something else at work too.
I love the hinged door idea for egg-gathering but here it would be one more
place to shovel and to chip ice off of. And currently I have my nest boxes
on an interior wall so the eggs hopefully don't freeze quite as fast. In
my next chicken house..........
Someday I'll move to a warmer clime and make life easy on all of us. Of
course I've been threatening that for a loooong time. I'm looking now,
though, in east Tennessee and western Virginia, so it's getting closer.