I’ve been walking over to document my neighbor Steve’s progress in moving a house onto a foundation on his lot. I discovered this great predator-proof chicken yard. Steve used rebar to form a dome shape (strength-in-curves) frame and covered it with chicken wire. We are about to build a new chicken coop for our bantams and I’m going to use this setup for their yard.
About Lloyd Kahn
Lloyd Kahn started building his own home in the early '60s and went on to publish books showing homeowners how they could build their own homes with their own hands. He got his start in publishing by working as the shelter editor of the
Whole Earth Catalog with Stewart Brand in the late '60s. He has since authored six highly-graphic books on homemade building, all of which are interrelated. The books, "The Shelter Library Of Building Books," include
Shelter,
Shelter II (1978),
Home Work (2004),
Builders of the Pacific Coast (2008),
Tiny Homes (2012), and
Tiny Homes on the Move (2014). Lloyd operates from Northern California studio built of recycled lumber, set in the midst of a vegetable garden, and hooked into the world via five Mac computers. You can check out videos (one with over 450,000 views) on Lloyd by doing a search on YouTube:
Nice. I'm interested in the chicken tractor idea. Can that setup be moved?
I had a bug zapper in a chicken yard once and my chickens stayed awake all night eating bugs…
We settled on a modified "chicken moat" style using a double fence corridor surrounding the garden as the bird run, with aviary netting over the top. Keeps the hawks out for sure. However, we've underestimated the ability of racoons to dig under the fence and have lost a duck already. I've also been warned that "chicken wire" is to keep birds IN, not to keep any predators out. It is pretty flimsy stuff – our main coop is fenced in with hardware cloth. Much more expensive, but nobody can get in or out of it.