HELP! Show me your chicken-proof garden fencing!

Quote:
Pretty sunflowers, Msbear!

I agree about the pickets not being desirable to perch on and over. I have a 42 inch tall picket fence on my veggie garden. The hens have never hopped over it. My old fence had wider spacing and a couple loose pickets and they used to squeeze through, but never over. I rebuilt the fence with tighter spacing between the pickets. Now there are no more chickens in there except when I forget to close the gate.

Oh goody! Finally a topic where I have something to add. You might want to go here to see the pictures relating to my answer:
http://s185.photobucket.com/albums/x91/OldGuy43/For BackYardChickens/Chicken Fencing/

It started as an old dog run with falling down cyclone fencing. When I started to make my first garden early last spring I was worried about the horses getting into it and took down what was left of the cyclone fence and replaced it with a board fence made out of 10' pallets. Not real pretty, but where else can I get 10'x4' ready-made fence panels for a dollar a piece? I can't even buy the lumber for that price.

When we decided to keep chickens I knew that the board fencing wasn't going to be enough and bought some of that poultry netting from Wal-Mart and added it to the outside of the board fence. We brought the cluckers home and the net worked for about a week before we started discovering our hens out in the horse pasture. It took a couple of days to figure out what was happening. They were slipping through the board fence and pecking a hole in the net thus making their escape. They than had trouble finding the hole so that they could get back in. Obviously more work on their fencing was in order.

Next I went to Lowe's. There I found some metal fencing designed to keep rabbits and other pests out of a garden. If you look closely at the picture you can see that the mesh on the bottom is smaller than on the top. Once I put that on the outside of the board fence and netting the problem was solved.

One more plus to the pallet fence. Our hens love to roost on it at night. They have never offered to go over it. I'll try and add a picture of that tonight.

I'm still a New Egg and can't post pictures hence the link to PhotoBucket. I have reduced the size of the pictures to 640x480 for those with slower connections. If you would like larger, more detailed ones I can provide them.

OldGuy43
10 Red Sex-links

We were growing those miniature pumpkins and they were coming along great and one of us left the garden fence makeshift door open... those chickens of mine pecked every single pumpkin I had to the point it destroyed them, lost something like 12-15 baby pumpkins or so. But then they came running over to me in a big group, swinging their hips, happy to see me. Hard to get mad at them.

Any fence mentioned will do great if you clip their wing. Everyone s clipped here and free range, and never go over the fence to get to the garden.

I built this fence around my garden & have not had a problem: