Since our neighbor's dogs attacked our flock last Thursday, we have been planning a nice big pen for them in our backyard. Right now the chickens are staying in their tractor, but the ducks are still out in our front pasture with the horses and the goats. We've hustled to get this pen going so we can get everyone into a safe area. We're making it 40'x40' in a corner of the backyard. For fencing we're using 6' high welded wire fence with 8' t-posts and a couple wood posts. We had a bunch of leftover 5.5' t-posts, so we're putting those between the 8' to save some $. On the existing fence, we're screwing on some short metal garden posts and then running some welded wire so it will match the 6' height of the two new walls. We'll be keeping the chickens wings clipped. In the middle of the pen we're putting in a small pond that will have a pump going up into a large pot. The pot will be filled with gravel, aquarium filter foam, and peat moss. We'll have a couple of large holes drilled into the bottom, so it can drain back down into the pond. This will filter out the duck poo from the water, so we won't have to change it so often (hopefully!). I'm not sure what we're going to do for a "house" yet. We'll likely start with just putting the chicken tractor in there and a couple of dog houses for the ducks. Once they're all settled in, we'll plan the housing part of the pen. I want to be able to use the tractor for raising young chickens or for quarantine. My husband wants to build a "straw bale" house for the chickens, with roosting bars and nesting boxes in it. I don't know, we'll see . I'll take more pictures of it as it progresses, and update this thread. Here's the first picture, after the new fencing it up and the pond is in place, but not done.
Nearly done now. We just need to fill in around the pond and install the pond filter/waterfall. We took our current Chicken Tractor and attached it to the outside of the pen for now. I cut a small hole in the side of the wire and connected it to the pen's wire. I'll build them a more premanent coop later on. We're also going to build a couple of smaller pens off to the side for the roosters we plan on getting, so we can keep them separated and know who's bred who. The ducks have the dog house, or they can sleep under the tractor. So, in the pen right now we have 9 ducks and 9 chickens. One chicken is still in the sick ward after the dog attack. It will be a week or three before she's ready to go back in. Nothing fancy, but it works well for now! And I like the chickens to have a lot of room to roam around. The pen is about 40x40'.
