Our egg factories continue to receive far too much attention and far too many luxuries. Especially considering they haven’t produced a single egg yet.
Over the weekend we built a fence to surround the Chicken Taj Mahal. The fence isn’t designed so much to keep anything out as to keep the chickens in. Chickens are a major pain in the garden.
When we first moved the little chickens out to the coop we built them a little yard using some exercise pens and bird netting. The danger for little birds is that the crows will kill them.
The chickens are now plenty big enough to be out of crow danger but they were quickly out growing their little “play pen” so it was time to build a proper chicken yard.
Because the coop is inside the electric fence there’s not too much problem with coyotes or dogs. So the fence only has to keep chickens in — meaning it can be 3 or 4 feet tall. (Fliers get their wing feathers shortened)
The first step is gather up (buy — ouch!) your fencing materials.
Then you dig some post holes. Here at Black Dog Farm that means you put the backhoe on the tractor and make big holes in the ground.
You get something that looks like this.
Some of the rocks have to be taken out with a pike. Ones like the one next to the five gallon bucket.
Then you set up the posts. As demostrated by our dedicated engineer.
Getting the posts in is the first challenge. Then you have to wrestle with the fencing and install the rails.
I ran out of patience for the picture taking and smashed my thumb — it’s very purple — while we were tacking the wire fencing up.
But here it is assembled and doing its job of containing the chickens. We kept the gate section from the original playpen yard because it was much easier than building a gate.
