Our Chicken Run

I’ve been asked for some pictures of our chicken run/fence. While our property doesn’t have a perimeter fence, we do have a chicken run to keep our flock safe at night and during inclimate weather, and we free range them in nice weather.

The back side of the coop is covered with hardware cloth and we close off that area for new chicks once they’re finished brooding as we introduce them to the rest of the flock. That works perfectly and having the coop elevated allows them all to have shelter under the run when it’s hot without having to be in the coop itself.

We used prefab pine fence panels which I liked quite a bit. We cut one of them to make our gate and added all the hardware ourselves.

The south, west, and northern most sides have 2 rows of chicken wire, about 10-12′ high because that’s where the birds would try to fly out. The other sides have 6′ because those directions weren’t challenged so I hadn’t bothered with additional chicken wire.

We didn’t permanently set the posts in case we decide to move the coop/run location in the future.

Here you can see the prefab panels. We fence stapled hardware cloth to them before we screwed them into the posts. We left about 4-6″ of overhang along the bottom, which deters animals like foxes, dogs, or the chickens from digging under the fence. We set cinder blocks around the perimeter to hold it down and eventually, the grass grew up around there to hold it.

I hope this helps answer some of the questions about our coop and run. Here’s a link to the post about our design and building process.