How to keep chickens out of the garden? UPDATED with successful method.

[Fred's Hens]

Poly fencing comes in various gauge thickness or heaviness. We use a stout poly fencing. Home Depot. 7' tall by 100 feet roll is around $65. Since we garden for profit, we must have a thousand feet of it, I guess. Cheap $1.99 landscape timers for poles and ziptie it on.

No, our chickens won't exert the energy to fly up 7'. They "could" but they don't.

 

[WildWorks]

Poly fencing comes in various gauge thickness or heaviness. We use a stout poly fencing. Home Depot. 7' tall by 100 feet roll is around $65. Since we garden for profit, we must have a thousand feet of it, I guess. Cheap $1.99 landscape timers for poles and ziptie it on.

No, our chickens won't exert the energy to fly up 7'. They "could" but they don't.

Thanks for the info!!!

 

[Ridgerunner]

Fred, how do you keep the weeds and grass down? That looks fantastic compared to how mine often looks.

 

[Fred's Hens]

Fred, how do you keep the weeds and grass down? That looks fantastic compared to how mine often looks.

50 years of experience.

Proper tilling, timely tilling, organic methodologies, mulching, only clean materials introduced, and of course, the hoe.

 

[Ridgerunner]

I was asking about the fence line. Sorry I was not clear.

 

[Fred's Hens]

Ridgerunner, sorry.

The bottom of the fence is not attached tightly. We can lift it once a month and mow under it with a push mower. A pain and a two person job. But I refuse to use herbicides, as we are an organic operation, of course. So, it is what it is.

 

[Beccabugh]

I am trying PVC pipe and bird netting over my raisedbeds. This is my first year having chickens, and I am hoping they can leave the garden alone with the netting up. Plus it will keep the magpies off my vegetables too.

For a 4x8 bed I bought
2 10' ft PVC pipe 3/4"
1 10' ft PVC pipe 1/2" to cut in 1' lengths, pounded in the ground to support the 3/4" PVC.
1 7'x25" roll of bird netting.

This covered one box great with some leftover. I pounded nails in the garden bos to anchor the netting to. Stretch edit over the bent PVC and it has kept the out so far!

 

[weaselslucks]

Would shh cats work?They are those cans of compressed air with motion detectors on the top. When something comes too close they let out a loud shhh sound.

 

[Daisy8s]

Update: I added either 2 or 3 strands of 17 gauge aluminum wire to the top of my 4 ft picket fence. This solved the problem in several ways.

First, because the birds would hop onto the fence posts and then hop down, the new additions to the tops of the posts block them from landing on the top of fence post. Second, if they try to fly right over the fence they hit the wire and harmlessly fall back (it's not electrified). The wire is too thin for them to see well so they aim for the picket fence and don't realize there's another 7-10 inches of clearance needed to get over the wire. I saw this happen once and I admit it was kinda funny. The chicken had no idea what she hit and kept pacing up and down staring at the top of the fence but unable to understand what she'd hit.

I also added height to the two gates to the garden to close up those gaps, too. It was a good three days work but my garden has been chicken free for several days now and I'm relieved.

 

[rungirl]

I like this idea for a daytime run behind a picket fence. It would look nicer than a typical chicken run in the backyard. How did you attach the wire exactly? Did you attach some kind of rod to the existing fenceposts?

I put plastic fence netting from Walmart around my big garden and held it up with plastic electric fence posts. It was cheap, keeps them out and I can roll it up and store it after the garden season is over. Also, I can get the tractor back in to till it up afterwards.