The Outside Chicken Run

Well here are the pictures of the outside run finally. I don't know what took me so long to get them out. Almost any parent can see what I reused from my kids. It's two of those plastic play yards. It's a little weak in the middle but I plan to put a bar in the center for more support. The pen is 12 ft. by 6ft. by 3ft. The top cover is Sun Shade fabric and it is rolled around a weighted PVC pipe at either end of the six foot sides. I am only using two pinch chips on either side of the twelve foot sides but I'm going to buy more. The Nesting House is an old cat playhouse I've held on to for 7 years. I always knew I'd find a use for it again. It's made out of the same plastic as those igloo dog houses and is big enough for all three chicken girls to cuddle up in if they wished. As I have said before I've had to find alternatives to shavings, hay, and straw due to allergies so as nesting material I use shredded coconut hull and it works great. I can't hang the food and water dispensers so I put them in the conners and tie them to the pen with rope. This makes it very hard for them to push them over. The little red bowl is their treat dish and the big blue tub is their dust bath. Because they are always on grass they don't get to dust bathe in a hole somewhere. Every two to three days I take everything out of the pen, collapse the pen itself and water the lawn really well. The next morning I set the whole thing back up again in a new spot. This way they always have fresh grass and I didn't have a big dead spot in my lawn. Plus if I see a spot in the lawn that need fertilizing that's where I set the run up. I think this is just another example that almost anyone can have chickens.