Chicken Challenges

AKA Realizing we have a run built for hobbits!

So, one of the perks of our new place was the fact that it already has a chicken coop and run built, eliminating the need for us to have to sink time and money into building one. Awesome, right?

Well, they say you should never count your chickens before they hatch, and never has this been more true! We moved into our place in October, and the following February we got a record snowfall for our area. Cool! We love snow!

Our chicken run, it doesn’t. Turns out, a large portion of the run collapsed under the weight of that record snowfall. We might have lost it all, except I noticed it was starting to collapse and swept the rest of the snow off the roof.

Thankfully, we had decided to wait until spring to get chicks, as we now had some major repairs and decisions to make about the run. We knew we wanted it smaller, but did we want to tear it all out and rebuild, or salvage what we could and make do for now?

Financially it made more sense to salvage it and wait to replace all the fencing on the run. So we made repairs, shortened the run, and got the coop ready for our hens. And that’s when we realized that the chicken run has another, major flaw.

Its built for hobbits. The door is only 3 feet tall. The roofed portion is only 4 feet tall. I’m the shortest member of our family, the refer to me as fun sized, and I’m in a perma-crouch whenever I’m in the run. Now, I’ve met the people who built this, they aren’t hobbits. One might even call them tall. I can only imagine their quad strength, given how much crouching that run takes!

So, we moved the girls into the coop. The ladies love it. They don’t care that their humans are forced to duck-walk when they come in. And that was when we discovered flaw number two. The fencing had holes big enough for a weasel to get through.

How did we know, you might ask? Because on the first day of settling the ladies into their new digs, a weasel came darting into the run, chasing a rat that had just run through. Neither one seemed to be much concerned by our presence!

We fortified the bottom few feet of the run with smaller guage fencing to keep predators out, but we haven’t bothered to dig down and bury it, since we know we’ll be ripping it all out and replacing it soon. And that’s when we realized our mistake. Chickens dig. As evidenced by the photo above.

Well, we needed a fix for that. So we added cinder blocks around the inside. They serve to hold the fence down, prevent digging under by the chickens (and keep Beatris from escaping again) and help keep predators out.

Our first year with chickens has been quite the adventure! I’m anxious to get out there and revamp the chicken run, but I’m also a little nervous about how much work that will take. Stay tuned for photos and updates when we tackle that project in the spring!