New Chicken Run Fence

This weekend we had beautiful weather and it once again reminded my why are we are trying to homestead.    The smell of the fresh air, the plants coming to life and being around the chickens really was beautiful. I admit sometimes I forget in the winter since we can't really do anything outside because of  all the snow, except shovel and snow blow.


One of our goals was to redo the fencing in our chicken's run. Before we decided to change the fencing we had metal stakes with welded wire fencing which work wonderfully to keep the chickens except for the ones that wanted to fly out. When we originally built the run it was made for our small flock of 9 birds but last summer the chicken bug bit me and we really increased our flock toward the middle to late summer. Since we were buying chicks they were under the heater lamp for a while until they went outside to the transition coop (see post called Raising Chickens- Part 2- Raising Older Chicks). As the chicks got older we would move them over to the larger coop but at the point it was early winter so they weren't outside much. Right now we have about 37 birds so they defiantly need more room to  roam around in. We free ranged our chickens last year but we saw them go in the road, they ate off my ornamental plants and flowers and not to mentioned we lost 18 in a dog attack late fall.

So this year I want to let the chickens free range as much as they can but in a contained area. The area that it shown is the back part of the run just temporary until we dig more holes for fence posts, the ground in still frozen at 18" down in some areas and we are digging down 3 feet to sink the posts. I'll update with more pics later. We used treated landscaping timbers ( we got ours for $1.97 each) and reused the welded wire from our previous fence. This new fence is sturdier than the previous metal stakes that we used and it looks nicer in my opinion.