How to look after your chickens by levelling up your pen | DIY Garden Projects | Gardening Australia

Millie’s chickens play many important roles in the garden: They’re compost makers, soil aerators, pest controllers, egg layers, and constant entertainers. So they deserve to be well looked after. Subscribe 🔔 http://ab.co/GA-subscribe
Millie has taken their old chook run to the next level, building a new one with higher walls, stronger wire mesh fencing, serious predator protection – and a roof will stop other birds getting in as well.

Building a new run from scratch has allowed Millie to plan for lots of extra features, and this includes supplying edible greens and other snacks for the chooks, especially when there’s less supply over winter.

Flat-pack cages:
Planting anything into a chicken run is dangerous – chickens won’t leave tasty morsels for later! – so, Millie is building a system of plant cages to allow new plants to become established. The cages are designed as a ‘flat-pack’ so it can be folded away and stored when not needed. For full details, see below.

Hanging feeder:
Millie also creates a hanging feeder that the chickens have to jump to reach, creating an activity to keep the chickens busy. To do this, she hangs an old hanging basket inside the run and fills it with green waste and treats, like seed heads, spent brassicas, and water melon on a hot day. – outer leaves or plants pulled out before the go to seed.

Snack hatch:
One downside to having an enclosed run is Millie can no longer lob a handful of greens over the fence as she’s working in the garden. Instead she has come up with an alternative access point that she calls the snack hatch. She has cut a hole in the fence wire at about head height and covered it with a slightly larger piece of wire mesh that is clipped above the hole so that it hangs over as a cover. Millie can simply push this open and deliver a handful of greens.

Hay bale:
But if you only have time and energy to deliver one plaything for your chickens, Millie recommends giving them a bale of straw or hay to play with. It’s an excellent source of mulch and compost too!

To make the flat-pack greens-growing cage.

What you’ll need:
Galvanised wire mesh
Wire cutters or angle grinder
Wire and pliers or ‘c’ clips and tool
Clips to fasten the cage to the fence; Millie used split rings
Tent pegs

What you do:
You can design a box to fit your space, this one is approximately 1m wide, and 0.5 deep and high. Millie designed her cages to have a sloping roof for easy-greens access, around 50cm high at the back, dropping to 25cm at the front.

The front wall is 100cm wide by 25cm high, a top lid measuring 100cm wide by 50cm deep, and the two side panels cut to match.

Measure and cut the wire mesh sheet to create four pieces per cage; the wall of the run acts as the rear wall. If you are building a free-standing cage, you will need 5 pieces.

Make sure to grind or file off any sharp protrusions that could hurt the chickens (or you!)

Using the c-clip pliers, connect the top ‘lid’ with the front wall along the length, then attach the side pieces to the front wall.

This can then be attached to a wire fence within the chicken run (or elsewhere), using the existing wall as the rear of the cage. Millie attaches hers with split rings and the top and tent pegs at the sides.

What to plant:
Millie prepares the soil (with some help from her chook, of course) and plants the favourites she knows they always devour when they get loose in the vegie patch! This includes silverbeet, beetroot, brassicas, and other leafy greens.

It’s a good idea to raise extra seedlings to fill gaps when a crop fails – this way you will always have some spare seedlings to cater for the chooks.

Millie plants more densely than normal, because she knows the plants won’t get a chance to reach full size. She also sprinkles a mix of different seeds, including wheat, raddichio and lettuce; these will germinate in any spaces, and offer the next generation of snacks.

The plants will grow up though the wire mesh and get pecked off as soon as the chickens can reach them.
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