The other side of the fence

The question is:
What to do when the grass is greener on the other side of the fence?

There's only one answer:

Go to the other side!

As I mentioned in one of previous posts, some of our chickens (recently only one) like to fly out from their run and stroll around.

Christine the Chicken enjoying the other side.

Of course, the reason why a chicken flies out of the run is not to practice her flying, but because the grass is, literally, greener on the other side.
And there are incomparably more bugs out there!

Guess which half of the photo is inside and which is outside of the run.

Thanks to chickens' relentless effort, the lush grassy carpet that used to cover their playground is by now completely gone. Not that chickens would suffer any inconvenience because of that. They still enjoy foraging and dust bathing and all their favorite pastimes. It's just that .... the grassy world out there looks now so much more exciting in comparison!

Power plant Oo / Chickens Playground in late October 2015.

So the other day we opened the gate and let chickens out to enjoy the grass. How happy they were!

Chickens and the grass.

But how hard it was then to persuade them to go back home! They were not cooperative at all.

Nobuo trying to convince the chickens to go back home.

It's clear that the real solution to the problem of an escaping chicken is not more nets or wires. The real solution is to let chickens go to the grassy area (but without having to chase them home every day). In practice, it means to turn the grassy area into a new chicken run. That's what we're going to do!

Chickens will then have two runs that they will use in turns. While they use one of them, the other has time to recover (in theory. We'll see how the rotation on only two runs will work.)
So we've started erecting wooden stakes for the fence around new playground.

Wooden stakes of the new fence. 

(Just in case it's not clear which stakes I mean.)

Let's see how fast we'll finish building the new run. Grass will eventually dry up in winter, so we better speed up so chickens can enjoy the last grassy/buggy feast.