Our little patch of paradise has always had problems with preditors, wether it’s feral cats or foxes or one time fairly spectacularly a goshawk it’s a fairly hazardous place to to be poultry.
With this in mind we sacrificed the back section of our enclosed garden to build a hen yard with a goal of “double bagging” our safety measures.
Shown in the photo to the right is the cordoned off portion of the garden and it’s chicken coop. More on that in a minute.
We opted to run geo textile fabric, followed by wire, followed by geotextile followed by about 30cm of sand in the bottom of our poultry yard. This gives use the best chance of identifying any attempts at ingress before we lose our livestock.
We then opted for an EasyShed 1.5×1.5 Pet House for our chicken coop. The added security of being able to close this up in the evening coupled with the timber collar on the bottom which again has wire on it’s floor and 30cm of sand gives us some extra piece of mind.
There is potential in the future we will install an auto opening and closing door into the original door in this pet house for the months when the sunrise and sunset are at awkward times to operate this manually.
The last step for us was building a wall to keep the chickens out of our vegetables. This was framed out of treated pine and painted before being covered in aviary wire.
We secured it to the top of the beam that makes up the front border of the poultry yard and to the overhead steel pipe from the garden frame.
We included in it’s design a split door so we can feed the chickens without risking them barreling past us into the garden.
We left provisions for potentially replacing this door with a sliding barn door with a porthole for the same function in the future.
So far our chickens are happy and safe in their yard.