Using a cot as a chicken brooder

Yes, we really did use our daughters cot as a chicken brooder/ enclosure the first year that we hatched chickens. We had about 11 chicks running around a cardboard box and realised we needed something larger and fast!

At that point, our daughter (now 2 and a half) was still sleeping in our bed and we hadn’t even set up the second hand cot I had bought on marketplace. It could work (we hoped).

We lined the bottom with cardboard and the sides too, to stop the chicks escaping through the bars. We used some scrap wood to build a little bar above to hang the heat lamp from too.

Amazingly, our daughter now sleeps very well in the cot. We just wiped it down and sterilised it too.

We also made use of our old puppy crate every year after this to keep our chicks in- it’s a perfect solution because it is portable so we can carry them all outside for some ‘contained free ranging’ and this allows the other chickens to come and say hello.

We’ve used raised bed covers as impromptu chick runs outside as well- it doesn’t always have to be pretty to work really well!