Home improvements

Having lived with our new garden poultry shed for a little more than a week we’ve started to think about ways to make it more suitable for housing animals instead of garden tools. Over the weekend we put a couple of these thoughts into practice in the hope that they’ll make life a little more comfortable for our turkeys.

The key change we made was to replace the thin (and rather brittle) plastic windows that came with the shed with a combination of wire mesh and an adjustable wooden shutter. This improves things considerably as:

• Having wire mesh rather than solid plastic in the windows enables us to drastically improve the ventilation (good ventilation is essential to avoid respiratory problems in poultry) whilst at the same time reducing the risk of a fox being able to push in the windows and get access to the turkeys.

• The wooden shutter can be opened in increments to let in the maximum amount of fresh air on warm days, or else partially closed to keep out bad weather. Overnight the shutter can be fully closed and latched to the wall of the shed to offer even more security from any predators that might be passing through our field.

Only time will tell how good these ‘home improvements’ are, but the signs are promising so far. All of the turkeys are roosting as normal and don't seem to be bothered in the slightest by the new additions to their home.