Today, I’m re-running a story originally published on Oct. 8, 2018. Looking back, I can’t believe how much the grandbaby has grown. The chickens have pretty much stayed the same size, however. LOL.

Anyway, I had forgotten about this story until I went back into older posts and then I remembered how much fun it was to put together. I also think it’s timely now because, around here anyway, it’s been raining cats and dogs. Not literally; the chickens wouldn’t like that! But, if you have chickens and a lot of rain, you might appreciate this inexpensive way to keep your chicken’s feed fresh and dry.

Making a Chicken Feeder from a Recycled Soda Bottle

We found this Soda Bottle Feeder for $3.50 at the Gift Shop at River Park North in Greenville, North Carolina, although we noticed you can also find it on Amazon.com for $5.99 and similar items for what we paid and upward.

Although it looked like it was for regular birds, we thought maybe it would work for our chickens, who are in the market for new bird feeders, so we decided to try it out. After all, the price was right.

To assemble:

We washed out an empty soda bottle and then waited to make sure it was all dry inside so they chicken feed wouldn’t clump and go bad.

The outer part of the black plastic shown above in the photo snaps off very easily.

We then poked two small holes in either side of the bottle, which was not as easy as we thought it would be because bottles are a lot more flimsy nowadays.

Once we got the “handle” inserted into the bottom of the bottle, we went on to filling the bottle with the feed. Our chickens prefer crumbles to pellets. We kind of expected getting the crumbles into the small bottle opening to be a laborious process, but, it was really simple.

We used a plastic pitcher (shown below) and poured the feed into the bottle while holding it over the bag of feed. It only took a couple of minutes to do this part.

Then we just screwed the feed part onto our bottle and viola!

Time to test it out!

Our final step was to find a place to hang it up (we used an old shoelace).

Then, we waited to see if it would work…

You can see below, it takes Roo, our rooster, a few seconds to figure out how the feeder works. But, once he gets the hang of it, everybody starts getting in on the act.

We’re really happy with this experiment, especially given the fact that we it only cost us $3.50 and we recycled a bottle in the process!