The Chicken Run

When allowing your chickens to free range is not an option, the next best thing to keep your ladies happy and to ensure that their eggs are as nutritious as attainable is a chicken run. A chicken run provides a place for chickens to safely follow their natural foraging and scratching instincts.

The ideal chicken housing condition is to have four square feet per bird in the coop, and ten square feet per bird in the run. Unlike chicken coops, chicken runs are pretty easy to construct. Plans are readily available online. A Web search will make an appearance ready-made runs ranging from $50 to $250, reckoning size and construction.

Before opting for a trust buy or build, the following is a list of some challenges you have to address:

1. Varmints - You'll need to keep your birds safe from suburb pets, raccoons, snakes, and raptors including hawks, owls, and crows. You don't want pigeons swooping in for a freebie and abandoning nasty diseases. Hooking, screening, or fencing for the run shouldn't have gaps bigger than an inch, to keep out raccoon paws and snakes. You should seriously consider having the same caging material over the top of the run to stay out the flying varmints.

2. Escape - Chickens can fly and can clear a five or six-foot fence. Though they are foraging, ground-dwelling birds, chickens bet bottom dollar on flight to escape predators by winging into the lower branches of trees.

Chickens also like to sleep at elevated roosts for safety reasons. This makes the netting across the top handy for keeping your chickens in, marked keeping varmints out. An alternative, if your chicken run is too large to enclose the top, is to clip the flight feathers, a painless procedure.

3. Mud - The ground of the run will be your biggest hurdle. Always locate your run on high ground with good drainage. Filling in mud is not good for your birds, making them prone to disease.

As foragers, chickens love to hunt in the dirt and amongst low-lying plants. Even at ten square feet per bird, it won't take mourn any greenery being pecked to oblivion.

4. Stationery vs. Handy Runs - If your run ought to remain in the same place, you will eventually have to provide ground cover or litter. Many types prove out, but a couple of inches of pine chips is recommended.

Ground cover of this nature is easy to clean by just raking it a few times a week. It dries quickly after a rain and keeps the birds off the dirt and beyond their droppings. Replacement of the ground cover should be done three or four times a year - the refuse can go onto your compost pile.

You can build or buy portable coops and runs, called "tractor coops" or "tractor runs." These allow you to relocate to new ground once the birds have had their way with the old. These are quite handy for a suburban environment.

Place the coop and nab an area of the lawn that needs help, let the chickens peck for a week or so, and after that move all of the contraption to another area of lawn. You'll be pleasantly awed from lush, verdant regrowth of the old chicken run site.

Optimum thing about a chicken run, beyond making your hens happy, is the nutritious value of the eggs they produce. Feeding grains on and on is not a healthy diet for egg-producing hens.

Studies have shown that chickens allowed to forage in grassy or weedy areas produce eggs that are higher in Omega 3 and vitamins A and E, along with lower in intensities of total fat, saturated fat, and cholesterol. And they just taste better, too.

Allowing chickens a place to simulate chickens is very important in lots of ways. Would you like being "all impounded" everyday? Chickens counterfeiting chickens makes them more cool and interesting to watch, which appertains the pleasure of having birds. And then there's the healthy eggs.

When bring together your complete chicken-keeping strategy, you have to place a big significance on your chicken run.

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