Free Guide · Small Additions That Change Everything
None of these are clever. All six of them changed how this place works day to day.
What are the best chicken coop features to add? The ones that remove a job you do every week. A trapdoor that lets the chickens weed somewhere awkward, a mister aimed at the ground rather than the birds, roosts at your eye height for health checks, pallets for winter mud, berries planted outside and trained in, and a double gate that stops escapes and stores your feed.
These are the parts of Chicken City that did not make the tour video. Some were in the original plan and some were retrofitted years later, once I had lived with the place long enough to know what annoyed me.
None of them are impressive. That is rather the point. The things that make a chicken run pleasant to run are almost always small.
Watch
All six, in place
Including the trapdoor, which is far easier to understand once you have seen the ridiculous little corridor it opens onto.
1. A trapdoor onto the awkward bit
Between Chicken City and the greenhouse there is a narrow corridor that exists purely because of where the two buildings ended up. Plenty grows in it, strawberries push through from the other side, and it is not somewhere I want to be harvesting food from.
For years I fought that corridor with my own hands and hated every minute of it. Then it occurred to me that if I was not going to use those plants, someone else could.
So we retrofitted a small trapdoor, years after the main build. It opens and drops down into a ramp, and the chickens in that room can walk out and clear the whole corridor for me. A job I resented, done by animals who consider it a treat.
The rule I keep with it: it is never open overnight, and never when I am not here. Open it while you are around, shut it before you leave, and the corridor stays secure.
If there is a neglected strip anywhere around your run, a trapdoor onto it might be the whole solution.
2. A mister pointed at the ground, not the birds
Worth saying plainly first: overheating is far more dangerous to a chicken than cold is. Summer is the season to design for.
The current setup is deliberately simple. A hose running across from the tap, a stake, one mister. It is on a timer, and I set the days from the week's forecast rather than leaving it running constantly. The best part is that it does not need me there. I can be at work knowing the girls are being looked after.
The bit people get wrong
You are not trying to mist the chickens. You are trying to wet the ground they walk on, because cool feet are how a chicken sheds heat. Aim it at the soil.
A few drips fall into a dish underneath, which I call the bath. It is meant for standing in rather than drinking from. They drink from it anyway, of course, because they do not appreciate the distinction.
The expensive version I decommissioned
If you watch my videos from three or four years ago you will see a misting system running right across the roof, with nozzles every couple of feet. It cost real money and took real time to install, and it air conditioned the entire space beautifully.
Then the pipes started cracking, sooner than they should have, and it became one problem after another. It is decommissioned now.
I can get away with one mister today only because the plants have grown up and the understory is genuinely cool and shaded. In those first years, when this courtyard was full sun all day, that roof system was a game changer. If you are somewhere hot with no shade yet, do not let my decommissioning put you off it.
3. Roosts at your eye height
Not revolutionary. Genuinely transformative if you have a lot of birds.
The main roost, the one most of mine choose to sleep on, sits at roughly my head height. Every couple of weeks I do health checks: cloaca, a look for lice, the beak, feeling whether the crop is full. That job has to happen at night, while they are settled on the roost and not inclined to walk away from you.
With the roost at eye height I stand in one spot and work along the row. With a low roost you are squatting in the dark; with a high one you are reaching over your head trying to part feathers to check for lice. Neither is a job you will keep doing properly.
Whatever your chicken house looks like, put the main roost where you can comfortably see along it.
4. A pallet boardwalk for winter
Chicken City gets very muddy in winter and it is awful. I hope yours does not, but I suspect that is the general vibe of chicken keeping.
The main thoroughfare here takes the most traffic and gets the worst of it. So when I put in the raised bed with the citrus, I set the gap between it and the compost bins to be exactly one pallet wide.
Every winter I drag pallets in and lay them end to end down the middle. I walk on the boardwalk instead of squelching through mud. In summer I take them out again, with some pleasure.
Pallets are the easiest thing in the world to get hold of free. The catch is the one thing you cannot retrofit: the width has to be designed in at the start. If you are laying out a run now, make a walkway exactly one pallet wide and thank yourself in five winters' time.
Also on the channel
The rest of the mud answer
A boardwalk keeps you out of the mud. This is how I stop the floor becoming mud in the first place, which is the same system that keeps the whole place from smelling.
5. Berries planted outside, trained in
There is a thornless Waldo blackberry growing along the wall of the chicken courtyard that gives me an enormous amount of fruit in summer. The wall of the coop is producing food, which delights me.
The trick is where it is planted. Its base is not in the courtyard at all. It is in a different room entirely, out of reach, so the chickens cannot scratch up its roots or take the new shoots as they come up. Only the long fruiting arms get trained in, along the coop wall.
So the plant is completely protected, and I get an abundance of berries out of a space that was otherwise doing nothing except being a wall. Which is useful, but you know how I feel about a thing that only does one job.
Any berries that drop, the chickens are thrilled to deal with.
6. A double gate, which is really two features
An airlock. Two gates with a space between them, and you pass through one at a time.
Reason one is escapes. The chickens very much want to be wherever I am, so they follow me to every gate. Without the second one you spend a good part of your life chasing birds back up a hill. And I also have two cheeky goats and a pony out there, so a single gate would mean goats in the chicken house and chickens down the paddock, all at once.
Reason two nobody expects. That space between the gates turns out to be superb storage. It is right in the heart of the chicken yard, exactly where you need things, and completely chicken-proof. Mine holds a bench, the feed bins, the chicken supplements, key garden gear and all the harvesting baskets. It is a bit hectic in there and it works perfectly. It costs you some space and some money, and I would pay both again.
The thread running through all six is the same one that runs through my cooking: the best thing you can add is usually a small one that quietly deletes effort. Which is more or less the entire brief of the original Flavour Bomb.
Alyce's Favourite
Maximum taste, minimal fuss
Alyce's Organic Flavour Bomb Salt
Organic, smoky and savoury. Use it anywhere you would reach for plain salt.
Shop the Flavour Bomb SaltWhat goes wrong
Leaving the trapdoor open
It is a hole in a secure perimeter. Open while you are there, shut before you go. No exceptions overnight.
Misting the chickens
Soaking the birds is not the goal and they will not thank you. Wet the ground so their feet can cool.
Elaborate systems that fail quietly
My roof misting pipes cracked well before they should have. If you build something complicated, know how you will notice when it stops working.
A walkway that is not pallet width
The one thing on this list you cannot bolt on later without moving a garden bed. Set the width now.
Planting the berry inside the run
Then you are protecting a root system forever. Plant it outside and train the arms in instead.
Frequently asked questions
How do you keep chickens cool in summer?
Shade first, then a mister aimed at the ground so their feet stay cool, on a timer set from the forecast. Overheating is more dangerous to a chicken than cold.
How high should a chicken roost be?
For your sake, at your eye height. Health checks happen at night on the roost, and you will do them far more consistently if you are not squatting or reaching.
How do you deal with a muddy chicken run?
Two separate jobs. Keep yourself out of it with pallets laid along a walkway sized for them, and stop the floor turning to mud in the first place with a deep carbon litter.
Is a double gate worth it for a chicken run?
If anything follows you to the gate, yes. And the space between becomes chicken-proof storage in the best possible position.
Can you grow berries on a chicken coop wall?
Very well, as long as the plant itself is rooted outside the run and only the fruiting arms are trained in.
Building your own version of this?
I have been refining Chicken City for over ten years and I share what works, what failed, and what I would do differently. Come along for the rest of it.
More from Chicken City
How to build a predator-proof chicken run covers the structure these features were added to, including the double gate and the buried mesh.
How to stop chickens destroying your berry plants goes further into the plant-outside-train-in trick used on the Waldo blackberry.
How to stop your chicken coop smelling is the other half of the winter mud problem.
Chicken City, the details has the layout and rough plans.
Watch next
Where all six of these live
The full tour, so you can see how these small additions sit inside the bigger system.
