hi guys we have decided to get a chook house for at night & have a large fenced off area for during the day the fence needs to be moveable - we are going to place the chook house inside the fenced area e.g top left hand corner - when required we will move the fence so the house is in the bottom left hand corner, top right bottom right etc - thus giving us a huge area the chooks can forage, clear of weeds etc - sorta like a massive tractor LOL but what do we surround it with - will ordinary fencing work? (small mesh or couse) will we have to use predator proof mesh? , electric fence? i dont want to go on overkill but would like to contain em like i say they will be in at night , so what should we use??? thanks in advance sam
Good on you for getting chooks! Best decision we ever made, ours have just started to lay, after getting them in September as day-olds. So, fencing... well it would mostly depend on what predators are around, so what you need to keep out. We have a similar sounding setup but with just two runs, and the chooks are locked in a 'maximum security detention centre' :lol: chook house at night. We were given stacks of the mesh fencing used in construction sites - with the shade cloth on it - and we just have that going around trees and a few star pickets along for added support. But... we have nothing nearby that can harm them. Dogs have to get through another fence to even get a look at the chook run and we don't have other daytime predators. So if you have foxes or anything like that you would need it secured into the ground.
Haha crookie.. way to go... I like the idea of 2 runs instead of one big one, makes for a great vegie garden on one side and a chook run on the other.. cheers
wehave a huge area - 7000sq m that they can roam around , so getting them to clear that first after we will make an area with the veg patch on one side & run on the other do you cover the top of the mesh? or is it left open
Pootle, Top is left open. The shed area is in the middle. It is not common that chooks are attacked by eagles etc and I have never seen one in the enclosure. I did have a couple of baby chickens taken by hawks. As a rider to the above though I dont have to deal with foxes and unless you build an actual aviary it's near impossible to keep a determined python out. With this set-up you can do a summer/winter garden rotation & fallow. floot
eagles/ hawks and chickens we just spotted the cause for our declining stock of young excess cockrels that we let run around in the chok run during the day. A nice little hawke visited on the weekend and we had not let the chooks out yet and came out to see why they were going crazy.. this little hawk was strutting along the top of the roof... he was looking as happy as a pig in mud and very well fed. Luckily we are not too hung up on lossing a few excess cockrels and feednig the native wildlife.