Rain Barrels, Chicken Coops, and Solar Panels gives you full step-by-step instructions for 18 projects to help you reduce your carbon footprint, live off the grid, and increase your independence. Learn how to make a backyard chicken coop, wind turbines from easily available parts, low-cost solar panels, and other high-tech but low-impact projects. All projects come from Instructables.com, are written by sustainable-living experts, and contain pictures for each step so you can do it yourself. When the apocalypse comes and the city-state fades from memory, you'll be prepared!

Rain Barrels, Chicken Coops, and Solar Panels gives you full step-by-step instructions for 18 projects to help you reduce your carbon footprint, live off the grid, and increase your independence. Learn how to make a backyard chicken coop, wind turbines from easily available parts, low-cost solar panels, and other high-tech but low-impact projects. All projects come from Instructables.com, are written by sustainable-living experts, and contain pictures for each step so you can do it yourself. When the apocalypse comes and the city-state fades from memory, you'll be prepared!

As the popularity of urban homesteading and sustainable living increases, it’s no wonder you’re in need of trusted, practical guidance on how to properly house the chickens you’re planning (or have already begun) to keep. Building Chicken Coops For Dummies gives you the information you need to build the most cost-efficient, safe, and easy-on-the-eye enclosures for your backyard flock.

This practical guide gives you easy-to-follow and customizable plans for building the backyard chicken coop that works best for you. You’ll get the basic construction know-how and key information you need to design and build a coop tailored to your flock, whether you live in a small city loft, a suburban backyard, or a small rural farm.

• Includes detailed material lists, instructions, and schematic plans for building a host of different chicken coops
• Step-by-step guidance on how to build a coop—or design your own
• Accessible for every level of reader

Whether you’re just beginning to gain an interest in a back-to-basics lifestyle or looking to add more attractive and efficient coops to your current flock‘s digs, Building Chicken Coops For Dummies gives you everything you need to build a winning coop!

Build the Perfect Housing to Fit Your Flock

Bring your chickens home to roost in comfort and style! Whether you're keeping one hen in a small backyard or 1,000 birds in a large free-range pasture, this delightful collection of hen hideaways will spark your imagination and inspire you to begin building.

Author and farmer Judy Pangman combed the country to select these 45 coops for housing both laying hens and meat birds (chickens or turkeys). The coops range from fashionable backyard structures featured in the annual Seattle Tilth City Chickens Tour and the Mad City Chickens Tour in Madison, Wisconsin, to the large-scale, moveable shelters Joel Salatin has fashioned for Polyface Farm in Virginia.

You'll also find ideas for converting trailer frames, greenhouses, and backyard sheds; low-budget alternatives for working with found and recycled materials; and simple ways to make waterers, feeders, and nestboxes. A gallery of color photographs provides other creative ideas to get you going. With basic building skills, a little elbow grease, and this book of conceptual plans and how-to drawings, you've got all you need to shelter your flock.

Since 1973, Storey's Country Wisdom Bulletins have offered practical, hands-on instructions designed to help readers master dozens of country living skills quickly and easily. There are now more than 170 titles in this series, and their remarkable popularity reflects the common desire of country and city dwellers alike to cultivate personal independence in everyday life.

Keeping chickens—even for city dwellers is a trend that just keeps on growing. With this book, today’s modern farmer will find plans and construction techniques for making seven different chicken coops, fun chicken facts, and recipes for eggs. Experienced farmer, woodworker, and author Chris Gleason's hip eye for design, combined with sound woodworking techniques make the coops both attractive and sturdy. Practical information such as how to properly size a coop and how to source reclaimed materials is included.  Don’t miss the authors “tour de coop” where he visits coops from other backyard farmers to find out why they keep chickens and what lessons they have to share with others interested in doing so.

Keeping chickens isn’t just for farms! The backyard chicken revolution has coops popping up in neighborhoods all over. Home-raised chickens provide a great source of superior, organic eggs that are as close as your backyard. Chickens also make good pets and provide free fertilizer—and lots of fun. Backyard Chickens Guide offers plans and photos for 16 custom coops built by real chicken owners, (including three portable designs known as tractors). Read their stories and learn from their experiences, then head out to the backyard to start your own flock.

• ISBN13: 9781580175272
• Condition: New
• Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed

Cows and horses, donkeys and mules, sheep and goats, pigs and fowl, even llamas are living on small farms and in backyard barnyards throughout the United States. But how and where are these critters being housed?

Author Carol Ekarius knows. In How to Build Animal Housing, she provides dozens of plans--with illustrated, step-by-step instructions--for species-specific shelters that are well ventilated, safe, appropriate for the animals, appealing, convenient, and a solid value for their owners.

The book is essential reading for anyone interested in animal health and welfare. It includes complete plans and step-by-step, illustrated instructions for sheds, coops, hutches, multipurpose barns, and economical easy-to-build windbreaks and shade structures. Ekarius covers new high-tech, portable structures made of plastics and fabrics, such as hoop houses and hen spas, as well as more traditional alternatives, such as straw-bale structures. Always practical, she enumerates the advantages and disadvantages of ready-to-build kits and modular barnyard buildings and includes designs for watering systems, feeders, chutes, stanchions, and more--the essentials that help owners keep their animals healthy and happy.

Ekarius wisely emphasizes the importance of careful planning, choosing an appropriate housing site, and complying with local zoning regulations; pest control, basic housing maintenance, and insurance costs are also discussed. Real-world advice from farmers and veterinarians on the types of housing and facilities animals like best enliven the text throughout.

How to Build Animal Housing is the most comprehensive and useful guide of its kind. For small-scale farmers, hobby farmers, do-it-yourselfers, and animal lovers, this book is indispensable.

Last year, nearly 200,000 eighth graders took the entrance exams to get into Catholic high schools. For many, this is their first time taking any kind of standardized entrance exam. To help make the experience a positive one, this valuable guide provides expert advice, practical tips, and lots of practice to help students prepare successfully for test day. It also provides tips for parents to help their children maintain realistic expectations while studying for the exam.

Included in Kaplan Catholic High School Entrance Exams are six full-length practice tests—two for each exam commonly administered—the Cooperative Entrance Examination (COOP), the High School Placement Test (HSPT), and Test for Admission into Catholic High Schools (TACHS). Also included are diagnostic quizzes with targeted feedback; a review of key concepts and material found on tests; and upto- the-minute test information and changes. Kaplan Catholic High School Entrance Exams gives students the study tools and reassurance they need to achieve a high score on this important test.

From the acclaimed author of Population: 485 and Truck: A Love Story comes a humorous, heartfelt memoir of a new life in the country.

Living in a ramshackle Wisconsin farmhouse—faced with thirty-seven acres of fallen fences and overgrown fields, and informed by his pregnant wife that she intends to deliver their baby at home—Michael Perry plumbs his unorthodox childhood for clues to how to proceed as a farmer, a husband, and a father. Whether he's remembering his younger days—when his city-bred parents took in sixty or so foster children while running a sheep and dairy farm—or describing what it's like to be bitten in the butt while wrestling a pig, Perry flourishes in his trademark humor. But he also writes from the quieter corners of his heart, chronicling experiences as joyful as the birth of his child and as devastating as the death of a dear friend.

Book Description

In over his head with two pigs, a dozen chickens, and a baby due any minute, the acclaimed author of Truck: A Love Story gives us a humorous, heartfelt memoir of a new life in the country.

Last seen sleeping off his wedding night in the back of a 1951 International Harvester pickup, Michael Perry is now living in a rickety Wisconsin farmhouse. Faced with thirty-seven acres of fallen fences and overgrown fields, and informed by his pregnant wife that she intends to deliver their baby at home, Perry plumbs his unorthodox childhood—his city-bred parents took in more than a hundred foster children while running a ramshackle dairy farm—for clues to how to proceed as a farmer, a husband, and a father.

And when his daughter Amy starts asking about God, Perry is called upon to answer questions for which he's not quite prepared. He muses on his upbringing in an obscure fundamentalist Christian sect and weighs the long-lost faith of his childhood against the skeptical alternative ("You cannot toss your seven-year-old a copy of Being and Nothingness").

Whether Perry is recalling his childhood ("I first perceived my father as a farmer the night he drove home with a giant lactating Holstein tethered to the bumper of his Ford Falcon") or what it's like to be bitten in the butt while wrestling a pig ("two firsts in one day"), Coop is filled with the humor his readers have come to expect. But Perry also writes from the quieter corners of his heart, chronicling experiences as joyful as the birth of his child and as devastating as the death of a dear friend.

Alternately hilarious, tender, and as real as pigs in mud, Coop is suffused with a contemporary desire to reconnect with the earth, with neighbors, with meaning . . . and with chickens.

Amazon Exclusive: Marshaling Memories by Mike Perry

Student Attitude to Date: Work Habits: Continues to Waste Time. Mike appears to belligerent\when asked to get to work.

A mother's handwriting.	Welcome home.

In other cases we strive not for verification but elicitation. In looking at the first photo on the right I can recall what it was like to be a shirtless farm boy in the sun; the straw-like smell of the stubble and how it pricked the soles of my bare feet; and, out of the blue, an unexpected emotional wallop as I recognize my mother’s handwriting and realize that the evocation of a person hardly requires their likeness. Literal traces will do.

Sometimes--and I am not speaking here of fabrication--we must construct memories we never retained. Poorly-lit as it is, the secpnd photo tells me much about my world as it was on my third day of life: that my father was the type of man who would grab a sheet of discarded stock from the paper mill of his employment and fashion a sign to welcome his wife and firstborn son home from the hospital; that the big ship painting currently hanging upstairs in my parents farmhouse has been in the family since the beginning; and finally (this required close study until I made out the rocking chair in the shadows, and further realized that the two strips of shininess visible toward the right side of the piano were reflected from the gilded pages of two bibles), I was able to conjure the week-old me, safe in my mother’s arms, the Word of God close at hand, belief and unbelief yet to come.

Fresh Air or Bust! To stay healthy, your chickens need plenty of ventilation—probably more than they’re getting today. This was discovered over 100 years ago, but has been largely forgotten. Today’s small-flock housing tends to be dank, dark, and smelly. Chickens, like miners’ canaries, are easily harmed by poor air quality. Wet litter breeds disease. Darkness forces chickens, like parrots, to be artificially inactive. “Dank, dark, and smelly” is a deadly combination! Closed chicken houses are so harmful that knocking out a wall can cause an immediate improvement, even in winter. Chickens, after all, have a thick coat of feathers to keep them warm, but are vulnerable to poor air quality and pathogens in the litter; and their unwillingness to eat in the dark means they can starve in the midst of plenty. Fresh-Air Poultry Houses was written by Dr. Prince T. Woods, a noted poultry health expert. Dr. Woods describes not only his own poultry houses, but those of many of his clients, giving the book a breadth of experience that makes it a unique resource. This 1924 book is old-fashioned and a little eccentric, but in a good way. Fresh-Air Poultry Houses is a good example of the Norton Creek Press motto: “Most of the best books are out of print and forgotten, but we can fix that!” See our Web site at http://www.nortoncreekpress.com