Building a Chicken Coop Fence

I am doing some catching up on my blog posts ~ this was back in June!


In our neck of the woods, we need to have a good chicken fence for a few reasons:
1. So that the chickens don't fly out
2. So that hungry foxes don't make off with a tasty lunch


While we were letting our chickens be "free range", we attracted some foxes and they took off with 14 chickens.  This is not good.  We want the chickens to be able to scratch and dust bathe in the dirt, eat bugs and get fresh air and sunshine to make them Super Happy Chickens. Later, our little dog also killed a hen.  NOT GOOD!


So we enlarged our chicken coop!  All the wire was found at local Share Shed's through out the year...what a saving! ( Share Shed is a shed at the local garbage dump where people can leave or take anything that may have some value to someone still) Having chickens has been great fun for our girls and also teaches them money management when they buy feed and sell eggs, etc.  We can't afford to pay our girls "allowance" so having chickens is in place of this! 

Used the snake fence as a line for our fence.

We re-use and recycle as much as we can from around us ~ especially since we are renting this land and can't afford to put much more than blood, sweat and tears into it.

Didn't have a ladder handy...just a Mei...

She turned out to be quite an asset

Put some lighter weight wire and mesh on the top layer.

Work gloves and skirts 

We had to make a smaller pen inside the larger one for a temp. home for the oldie hens

We found some long metal rods that we pounded into the ground and then just put some chicken wire around them.  Little bits of wire are a sweet find in the garbage and worth collecting!

Rolling out the wire on the bottom.
Buried into the dirt, then rocks piled up to prevent a fox from digging.

 The fox was staring at our chickens through the wire one day...so we knew we had to prevent him from digging through.  Ideally, there would be mesh over the whole pen as well to prevent Eagles/hawks from scooping in.  It is very handy having some dogs around during the day!

Moved a shed over to be the meat chickens pen

Everyone looks happy with the new arrangements!

I shared this on ~

The Shabby Nest Frugal Fridays 

and

Farm Girl Blog Hop