Editor's Note: March/April 2008
More Than Building Plans
March/April 2008
Oscar H. Will III
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Kate Will
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Earlier this year, my wife Kate asked me to build her a freestanding pergola for the garden. Kate loves to grow climbing and running roses and flowering vines of all kinds. The request seemed so likely that I wished I had come up with the idea myself. Either way, the planning, building and planting of such a structure will be a wonderful project and gift enough for us both. I love to build things, and I especially love to build things for Kate. The pergola will be large enough to shade a small table and four chairs and sturdy enough to support rank woody vines and stand up to the sometimes substantial Osage County wind.
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One day, after an invigorating romp around the farm’s perimeter with stops at three frozen ponds to encourage the dogs to try their paws at skating, Kate and I searched the Internet for pergola plans. One thing led to another, and we found ourselves looking for designs to guide our eventual permanent chicken house’s construction. I was sure that some early-style brooder houses were octagonal in shape, so we searched for an eight-sided plan, which brought us to a marvelous book, The Illustrated Annual Register of Rural Affairs and Cultivator Almanac, for the Year 1861, by John J. Thomas.
We found a lovely description of an octagonal chicken house in Thomas’s book, but his advice on building suitable quarters for the flock so resonated with the concept of humane husbandry that Kate and I read excerpts aloud for the next hour and a half, and committed once again to keep our animals’ quality of life paramount as we take responsibility for their care. On the topic of proper poultry housing, Thomas admonishes us to:
Build houses for our poultry, convenient for their habits, and convenient also for our own; for if attendance of any kind of stock occasions too much trouble, they will often be neglected. In building, therefore, let the house be handy for the hens, and as handy for yourself as possible; and of the two, we would say, in preference, make it handy for feeding, and for cleaning and warming and ventilation, as the hour or season of each comes around.