A Desert Chicken Coop in the Arizona Desert

“Are you going to name your chickens?” I received this question multiple times and truthfully, before I acquired chickens, I did not attempt an answer. But when egg-shaped orbs of downy, yellow puffery arrived in a cardboard box charmingly chirping in an anthropogenic nest, I was enchanted…There is an inheritance in nurturing a delicate being that requires coddling to succeed, and I was overwhelmed with affection. So, despite all the chuckles, people name their chickens, and now I understand why, and ours are all named female heroines of children's literature.

I woolgather, envision, and I sketch; that’s the familiar process I assumed to my present rendering of this garden and its realization of raising egg-layer chickens. So, in my fashion, to learn more on a topic, being a kindred soul of Mary Lennox of The Secret Garden, I queried and researched chicken breeds within our parameters for a desert back-yard garden and climate. Since our desert home easily has multiple one-hundred-and-ten-degree summer days and then some, weather and climate narrowed our choices.  Ultimately, we settled on a heat-tolerant chicken whose personality was described as quiet and friendly, and a content backyard dweller named Austra White. Their white feathers are a bonus in the desert, and the white in their name describes the color of their eggs, and they truly possess the unruffled personality that I was hoping for. Interestingly, I learned that egg flavor mostly depends on the quality of their nutrition, not the color, and backyard hens that are loved and fed a healthy diet, lay flavorful eggs. So, don’t allow egg-color to cloud your judgement in choice of chicken breed.

Like the hobbyists that we are, we realized our temporary shelter would soon be outgrown! Most coop structures, as charming at they are, are not practicable here, because they become too hot inside. We narrowed our coop research to our climate, and ultimately, we decided not to reinvent the wheel and purchased a plan from a Tucson, Arizona architect. Gideon-D Architect drafted a walk-in coop plan for his son’s Waldorf school and the parents built it themselves. It was featured in Dwell magazine, and he was selling the school blueprint and the smaller version that we chose on Etsy. The architectural plan told us everything we needed to buy to build it down to the nuts and bolts. (We already had the tools.) The structure, which has a natural yet, a mid-century modern feel, took us over a month to construct ourselves and cost more than the plan estimated, only because lumber prices have soared in the last couple of months. But rest assured, my spouse built it well, and it will endure on its firm foundation with its beautiful beams, all stained a warm honey with a product safe for all of us and the environment. 

I envisioned the chicken’s enclosure as part of the fenced, flower garden but separate from the vegetable garden. The flower garden receives morning sun, and then shade, and then a bit more, before becoming fully shaded as the sun wanes behind the colossal cactus and lastly below the stucco walls of our property. This was a multi-stepped plan, and we accomplished part of it last summer by building a separate square-foot vegetable garden beneath a mesquite tree. This spring, we broke ground on the chicken enclosure by removing two of the four beds of the flower garden to site the chicken structure in the reimagined flower-cutting garden.

New visitors to our property are unexpectedly surprised. From the street, our garden really is a secret, and once inside, a desert wonderland, and the chickens’ enclosure rather looks and feels like a gazebo. The different directions of the "vents" on the sides of the structure create shade, shadow, and air movement within. One wall of the enclosure we purposely left a bit more open than the original plan, for the view and opportune shade of the cactus behind. As I mentioned earlier, once the sun slips behind our organ cactus, a condo complex to thrashers and cactus wrens, a much-diminished sun passes through to the afternoon garden. Additionally, since this is a walk-in enclosure, if we don't want to raise chickens when these pass, this can be cleaned and in my opinion, converted to a gazebo with seating because it is finished on the inside, sturdy, and large at 11.5 x 10 feet-squared with a loft of thirty-six feet-squared. 

This is a vintage cottage-style home, so I chose to make the chickens’ enclosure not just functional for our climate but a picturesque, magical destination and focal point in our desert garden. Though chickens can be happy most anywhere, this enclosure would look equally beautiful in a barren desert field. Since chickens love to roam but need safety, not needfully free, I desired an enclosure larger than adequate with a fenced play area so the little chickens can scoot and scratch in their abode and delight in the freedom of the fenced, flower garden relatively separated in our habitat from the feral cats, as well as coyotes, and birds of prey that threaten their exploration and existence. Perhaps someday, they will graduate to other areas of the property, with even more free-range, but presently they are still learning and developing at twelve- weeks.

We made some modifications inside the enclosure to create nearly all hop or flight distances less than eighteen inches from the floor. My husband built a ramp and a handsome bench the length of the loft beneath their roosting rail to decrease the distance to the floor and for functional cleanup. We also left the loft more open than the half-wall on the architectural plan due to heat because we live in the lower elevations of the Sonoran Desert. For now, we plan to purchase roosting boxes with the privacy curtain rather than build them. Yes, it is rather open but cold weather is not an issue. It rarely reaches thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit and most winter days are above seventy. Even the few coldest days are in the mid to upper fifties. The metal roof reflects heat, that means a human does not want to touch it on the exterior, but rest assured, it is keeping the chickens’ interior cooler. We are also collecting the roof’s rainwater. If we get one inch of rain we could capture sixty-four gallons of water. One inch at once is a rare occurrence here, so we have a fifty-gallon container. Since we normally wax and wane through dry spells and rain spurts during the summer, the water will likely get repurposed in the garden between rains, and if successful with rain collection, we plan expansion to other structures.

If you are interested in raising female chickens for eggs, read widely, check local ordinances, and examine your climate before choosing hens and building a coop, and lastly, if in the process of implementation you observe a problem, modify the plan, then experiment, and assess the result. Since completion of construction, we have already implemented several adaptations that have proved beneficial to the chickens. Ultimately, we make the managerial decisions! Often these days, people piddle politics of most everything; even chickens… absolutely! Keep this in mind during your research and application…Almost everything folks say you should do, equally as many say you shouldn’t do for your hens for example: deep litter, sand, or pine shavings, hemp, and the three-letter word, “hay”. Therefore, in my opinion, bravely and adventurously become an expert on your chicken flock and imaginatively create what will suit your family and home, and carry on with the affectionate appellations for your chicken family. And just in case you were wondering, after trying pine shavings, we settled on hemp litter for our flock's garden-home.

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