Help with lashing down a run?

[CoordinatedChaos]

Woke up at 7:00 a.m. and opened my window to see this. Thankfully I saw it before the chickens got out. In preparation for winter we have tarps over the top, west, and north sides because those are where the predominant winds come from. Obviously the tarps are not airtight and there are a lot of gaps, but clearly not enough. This morning we had SW winds so...rather unfortunate. The base of each vertical pole has a flat bottom with holes in it and we did have anchors through those, but they were only about 6" long.

As a makeshift fix, we removed 1/4 of the top tarps, the top half from the south side which is the back, and had a couple of rebar that we shoved into the ground near the two front corners and zip tied to attach. We also put heavy bricks inside around the base bar for weight.

Our current plan is to essentially shove rebar into the ground around all of the vertical bars and attach them to that. Does anybody have any suggestions, ideas, fixes? I would ideally like to recover the north side, but if we have these sorts of winds during winter I don't need this thing flipping over again.

We are having a small shed built on the east side of this as a new chicken coop. My husband talked about potentially attaching the run to that as well.

 

[2ndTink]

Those runs are super hard to keep from flying away once you add tarps on top. The rebar as long as it is deep enough to really hold it will help. I had good luck tying pallets to the sides to weigh them down and also provide wind protection.

Be careful if you get snow, these runs can / will collapse so be prepared to remove the snow as often as you can if it starts to build up on the roof. I have 2 of these still in use, one is 5 years old, the other 2 years, so it can be done, my 2 yr old run is a little sketchy honestly, I'm not sure it will handle another winter so it is on it's way to retirement here in a few weeks.

 

[Sefirothe]

I had one of those I used as a temporary grow out pen. Mine came with spiral ground anchors and straps to help anchor it down. Maybe look into something like that? Would work better than rebar.

And definitely DEFINITELY keep snow off the roof and use some 2x4’s to prop the center roof pole up if you get snow.