Chicken run

The run is finally complete! I moved the chicks from my bathroom to the coop, but I'm keeping them locked in there for the next month or so. Next Friday I'm getting another three babies, and I'm not going to feel comfortable letting them into the run without supervision until they're bigger.

Here's their current set up:

With the door closed and locked, I feel comfortable that they're safe. There is now hardware cloth running 1.5-2 feet out from the bottom of the coop, and it's buried underneath the woodchips. No animals should be able to dig inside now.

The run makes a larger rectangle around the coop, and then runs in a corridor across the width of the yard. The right side is partially made up of a rock wall terrace, which is overrun with weeds that the chickens should take care of once they're outside. I pruned the large bushes on top of the rock wall and tossed the branches onto the floor of the coop to create more insect habitat and organic matter for future composting of deep bedding.

They have a couple of stumps set up for hopping around, and two dust baths containing diatomaceous earth to prevent mite problems.

The back corner required creative arrangement of PVC and hardware cloth. It may look like there are gaping holes under the PVC, but the "skirt" of buried hardware cloth continues there. I made sure there weren't any gaps!

This is the view standing from the far end and looking back toward the coop. The tarp covers part of the roof to provide protection from the rain. Yes, we're in a drought right now, but when the rain eventually returns it's likely to be a torrent.

The door to the run. There's a bit of a gap between the far side of the door and the frame at the bottom, due to the PVC shifting around while we put up the wire walls. I'm going to put a triangular piece of hardware cloth across that corner of the frame, so that animals won't be able to push the corner of the door in.

Cai is trying to figure out how to get inside.

There is a path going across the slope of the yard to get down to the run.

The view from up the hill. I love how the run is bordered on two sides by tall shrubs/trees, making it feel like it's inside a forest (a chicken's native habitat).

I had chosen to construct the run out of PVC rather than wood because it was cheaper, lighter, and easier for a single person to put together. It's also very easy to customize and could bend in a couple of places where rocks or tree stumps were in the way. The downside is that its flexibility meant that the run leaned downhill and we got the problem with the door no longer being aligned. It was also a huge pain to attach all the wire panels with cable ties. In retrospect, it would have been better to build the frame with wood from Urban Ore, collected over a longer period of time since they didn't have enough 2x4s or other posts at the time I was buying the wood for the coop. Besides being more sturdy, it would have been easier to attach the wire panels by hammering in u-shaped nails.