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Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Backyard Chickens In Merewether

Here's how I spent the few free days I had over the Easter long weekend. There was a fair bit of rain and the soil was soft, so digging the footings wasn't so hard, more that it just had to be done. So, with a skirt of chicken wire extending out from the coop by about 500mm, it should be quite a strong defence against the foxes.


McCallum Made Chicken Tractors

Then the wire sits buried under 300mm of trench, backfilled with bricks, and then covered with finer wire and then filled in with concrete. It looks very solid and I hope it cures properly with all the sporadic rain and showers.


The corner posts are a bit messy, but whilst i was putting it together I thought it was more about function and security as opposed to form and design. For sure, the brick work isn't the tidiest or neatest, but it holds the wire in place wll so will be a firm deterrent to marauding foxes.


The chicken coop has a gentle downward slope away from the house so the waste has a clear run off. I initially planned on making the coop a third of its final size, and you can see the original trench I had dug across - it was stopped by thick tree roots from the eucalypts. I'm not sure if having the big tree inside the coop was such a good idea.


Anyway, more refinements and improvements as time goes on, am getting anxious to have some actual birds in the coop laying eggs for us!  Gourmet Hampers

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