At the back of my garden, in the area that I have fenced off for the chickens there is an old wire fence. It’s pretty sturdy but there was a small gap at the bottom of it, so before letting the girls out for the first time I laid some old bits of wood in front of the gap. Yesterday I was watching the girls scratch around out the back and I noticed that the gap had reappeared – the girls had scratched away so much of the soil around the base of the fence that the wooden planks had dropped down and made a gap big enough for a chicken to get through.
Today when I got home I decided to fix this before I let them out. In the end I decided to pull all of the planks out and attach the left over weldmesh to the planks. I then put them back and twisted the ends of the wire mesh around the existing wire fence. Now the back of the garden is looking a lot safer. Now there’s no way for the girls to escape…
After dinner I looked out of the window and Meg had managed to get over the netting and into the main part of the garden – looks like their little enclosure isn’t so perfect after all! I can’t figure out how she got out – I’m not sure whether she jumped the net or jumped up onto the coop roof and then down the other side. Hopefully if she does it again I will be watching.
On the plus side, when I got home from work today there were 3 perfect, un-cracked eggs in the little nest area that I made inside the coop.
Your chickens seem determined to get into mistchief. Good news in getting three prefect eggs though. The nest area seems to be working.
I got three eggs again today. I think I am very soon going to have to start giving them away otherwise I will get swamped with them…
Do you think you’d be able to sell them from an un-manned stall in front of your house? Some places near my parents house just have a ‘honesty box’ which unbelievably seems to work.
I’m not sure that would work where I live – there are a lot of chavs around here. Also I think eggs are pretty dodgy to leave laying around – more than likely they would end up thrown at windows…