The Chicken Run

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

The ideal chicken housing condition is to have four square feet per bird in the birdcage, 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 pop in ready-made runs ranging from $50 to $250, baseding upon size and construction.

Before preferring a rely on buy or build, the following is a list of some challenges you need to address:

1. Varmints - You'll need to keep your birds safe from environs pets, raccoons, snakes, and raptors for example, hawks, owls, as well as crows. You don't want pigeons swooping in for a freebie and transcending nasty diseases. Entangling, screening, or fencing for the run shouldn't have gaps higher an inch, to reserve raccoon paws and snakes. You should seriously consider having the same caging material over the top of the run to keep 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 reckon 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, together with 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. Replacing 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 wish for any greenery being pecked to oblivion.

4. Stationery vs. Transportable Runs - If your run must remain in the same place, you will eventually have to provide terra firma or litter. Many types wash, but two to three 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 among 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 around, and afterwards move everyone contraption to another area of lawn. You'll be pleasantly surprised at the lush, verdant regrowth of the old chicken run site.

Optimal feature of a chicken run, beyond making your hens happy, is the nutritional 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, as well as lower in intensities of total fat, saturated fat, and cholesterol. And they just taste better, too.

Allowing chickens a place to act like chickens is important in so many ways. Would you like being "all cooped up" everyday? Chickens imitating chickens makes them more cool and interesting to watch, which is part of the pleasure of having birds. And afterwards there's the healthy eggs.

When compiling your whole chicken-keeping strategy, you must place an enormous decidedness on your chicken run.

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