Collecting Rainwater and Eggs From a California Chicken Coop

I can attest to cats and chickens getting along just fine in some cases. My cats seem to think the peeping little things in the laundry room are kittens, after I introduced "the boys" to their "sisters". :)

Hi .. It's about a year ahead now from these previous posts and last week , Colorado lifted the ban on rainwater and now you can collect 150 gals. ... not at all enough in such a " drought for so long " part of the world , but all Colorado's water and many other states including northern California is owned by so. California and Arizona and Texas interests and they think all the water is theirs .

It's unbelievable and there's lots of criminals , meaning regular people who are trying to be sensible and responsible and catch their own water . Luckily , there's not too much enforcement in some places but others , watch out . { Not just water either , this year Utah made it " illegal " to go off the grid and re-instated the firing squad !! }

I love that roof and wind isn't a big deal in the hills of Santa Barbara but if you live where the drought is happening , nothing looks weird or funny if it's collecting water , the more , the better and some people even build "roofs" , free-standing , on the ground without buildings under them so they can collect water and live without electric pumps or wells .

And , you can bury cisterns in the ground and catch as much as you can , 1500 - 3,000 gals. , like lots of people in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado do .

I love this chicken coop so much ! Thank you for showing it <3

I think "the west" is a bit generic. In eastern Washington it isn't a problem to catch rain water, and Lowe's and Walmart carry not only rain barrels, but kits to convert other types of barrels onto rain barrels. In the spring, I catch as much rain as I can, pumping excess water from the rain barrels into plastic garbage cans then hand water my garden from the barrels. I am in the process of changing to a gravity fed drip system which should decrease my watering time and help me use water more efficiently. I am also planning to fill my barrels with snow in late winter. Will the captured water get me through an entire growing season? No but it will allow me to have a vegetable garden with minimal use of "city water". We gave up on a lawn some time ago. FYI: I live in a farming community and there would be an insurrection if local government told people that they couldn't grow their own food.