Monday, June 22, 2015

Chickens' first time on new playground

Our chickens can finally play on the grass outside the coop (click on picture for enlargement):

2015/6/22 morning. Chickens on their new playground.
(Visual distortion on this and other pictures is due to the fisheye lens of our Sony action camera)

Here are their first moments out of the coop:




On their new playground chickens are busy pecking everything that comes in their way, eating grass and chasing bugs. And digging ground for more bugs and seeds and other yummy stuff. Before, they used to flock around me when I came to feed them. Now they hardly notice when I come.  Which I take as a sign that they're happy on their own.

This is view from outside:


2015/6/22 morning. View from the south-west. 



2015/6/22 morning. View from the south-east.


The fence is made of metal lattice panels that we got for free from a new local friend of ours who happened to have an old fence he didn't need any more. We're happy that we could reuse something instead of buying new stuff. Reusing old fence also made it much cheaper for us.  

To put up the fence we needed fence posts, for which we used supporting poles of the power plant. This is one of the instances when having a solar sharing power plant on your land is more convenient than not having one. The fact that we didn't have to erect new fence posts saved us a lot of time. 

But this playground is still too small for our 30+ chickens. With  chickens pecking all day on an area of 20 square meters (that's the current playground size; the size of coop is not included), my guess is that the grass and insects will disappear within next 7 days. We plan to enlarge chickens' playing area to at least 10 times the current size. We just have to build a new, much longer fence - next task on our To do list. 

Chickens posing for camera.





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