Prior to moving to our current home and getting into the green fingered way of life we lived in a rented cottage on the side of a hill. When we took on the house we asked the landlady whether we could have a few chickens as we'd been chatting about it for a while.
Fortunately there was an area in the garden naturally suited to a small enclosure where about a dozen trees made a square perimeter in otherwise useless ground with established roots that would prevent tunneling in or out.
We started to read a bit about hen keeping and organised ourselves a huge roll of chicken wire whilst at the local builder merchants. The biggest question that we had was what to house them in. Asking around and it appears people use all sorts of ideas from old caravans to rabbit run style cages that they physically move around the garden as the chickens turn over the earth.
We were determined that we wanted to give them plenty of space and because we chose the tree enclosure they would spend all their time in one area. During a day off while my wife was at work I put some time into working out what we'd house any future poultry in. I wandered around Focus and settled on a miniture shed designed to keep garden tools in.
Later that evening I was chatting to a friend and found out that quite by chance a bloke along our lane kept hundreds of chickens and sold their eggs, apparently every year around this time he was required to replace most of the birds due to regulations so sold his old ones off for £1 each.
Fast forward a few hours and you can imagine my wifes surprise when she got home at 11 o clock that night to find me in the dark still fitting together the flat pack mini shed, a massive roll of chicken wire still packaged up and five rhode island red chickens were roosting in the boot of our car.
It took us until about two in the morning to stick the shed into place and manhandle the eight foot roll of chicken wire until we'd tied and stapled it to the trees sufficiently to keep them penned into their new home. On the plus side when we got them out of the car and placed into their new little den we found that one of them had laid us our first egg!
We loved keeping the poultry and ended up upscaling their accommodation to a full 6x4 garden shed with some built in nesting boxes and roosting bars. We also decided to put some cheap garden netting over the top of the enclosure after we came home one night to find every last chicken had disappeared; no feathers or bits suggesting a fox, just gone. It was only after searching extensively with torches for gaps in the fence that we realised they were all roosting on the roof of their eight foot shed. Apparently they are a bit more mobile than people give them credit for.
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