Due to a bad run of weather at the tail end of last week we unfortunately didn’t manage to get the chicken run built but we did manage to finish off sealing/painting the coop before the birds turned up. Our garden is fully enclosed so finishing the run wasn’t that important but it does need finished before my wife returns to work this week so you can guess what my plans are for this evening!

On Saturday we drove out to a local village to meet someone that my wife had met on the Practical Poultry forums. After having a look around his garden and his setup I think my wife was insanely jealous but we came away with our two birds as well as a good few eggs for our incubator. Since then I have been trying to fit in building the run with the help of #2 and trying to fit in some quality time with the rest of the family.

Since the day we moved in to our house we have neglected the garden. Apart from starting off the compost heap and cutting the hedges our work on the garden has been limited to trying to kill off the weeds on the patio and digging up the trees that ran along one wall of the garden. We had not managed to get rid of the cut up trees and bushes though and they’ve been kept since last year in the corner that we want to build the chicken run in.

So far I’ve managed to get a basic frame up which will let us get the wire mesh on tonight after a little bit of strengthening and once we’ve sourced the roofing we’ll get that on at a later date.

I’m not a carpenter as this picture will testify but hopefully it will do the job until we want to improve/update the run in a few years time.

So far from this project we’ve had questions from the kids on genetics, carpentry and sex. I think we’ve managed to answer everything we’ve been asked but some of the questions completely threw me at first! How do you sex baby chicks? How are eggs made? Why do only some of them hatch? Why is that bit of the run bent? I think we’ve came to understand that #1 knows everything there is to know about (as far as a 6 year old knows) about where eggs come from now and what makes a boy chicken and what makes a girl chicken. I’ve also came to understand that #2 isn’t as destructive as we think he is. I’ve never met a child that has the same effect on a room as a hurricane will have on campsite but in the hours that he was helping me his destructive streak turned into creative building session. When I hammered in the nails he spent the next 5 minutes hammering non-existent nails into the wood and checking that it was sturdy. You might think that it was just a son copying his father but he then spent the next 15 minutes building up the track for a wee plastic toy town we keep in our shed. He never does that. He usually plays with the cars and throws everything about instead.