As stated in our previous blog post, picking a chicken run for your flock is just as important as picking the right chicken coop.
If full-time free-ranging is not an option for your flock, you'll want to give them a space to scratch, peck, forge and even exercise! Providing them with plenty of enrichment activities, ventilation and sunlight, all while keeping any predator out, is key!
For our chicken run, we went with Omlet's walk-in chicken run.
We love this choice for many reasons, but here are the top few:
It comes with an anti-predator skirt all around the run
The lock is easily operated from both inside and outside of the run
It easily connects to any wooden chicken coop. We connected our wooden Roost and Root chicken coop to the Omlet run and use a solar automatic chicken door.
It can be extended in numerous ways (width, length and height) for your growing flock.
We recently just extended our run by 50% for our six hens. They didn't need the extra space, we just wanted to spoil them! Our run size is now 162 Sq Ft and used their 9'x18' configuration. We also added more of their weather-proof cover accessories to the top and sides of the run. Take a look at the before and after extension photos below.
The extension is very easy to add. It looks us less than 2 hours to add the new section. The hardest and most annoying part was taking up the grass the grew over the anti-predator skirt.
We just have the natural dirt that they've scratched up as their flooring and it works well. We clean the run the same time that we clean their coop (every 10-14 days) with daily raking. All we do it turn over the dirt, rake it and then sprinkle DiatomaceousEarth or First Saturday Lime with Sweet Coop all on he ground. We don't mix it in, we just keep a light layer on top.
For the fun stuff; their enrichment activities! We've tried a few things in their run but here are our flocks favorite items:
A chicken playground with hanging treat ball. Only 3 of our 6 hens jump up on the swings and perches but it is so cute when they do!
All of them love the treat ball on the playground so much, we bought them another hanging treat ball and hung it on the other side of the run. 95% of the time we fill both treat balls with heads of cabbage and they are all gone and pecked at in less than two days. We buy a lot of cabbage in this house :)
A Chicken Xylophone. But who am I kidding, we probably play it more than they do. They love it when we play it for them and it looks cute in the coop!
Chicken feeder toy. This is hands down their favorite toy. We started with one and bought two more. We fill these with grubs or mealworms and they will spend a very long time kicking and nudging these balls around the run to get the treats out of the holes.
When we added the new extension, we also made them a salad bar which is what you see as the pallet. I'll be adding a blog post about this soon! I wanted to see if it worked and if they would event like it but so far, THEY LOVE IT.
And of course a dirt bath! We used an old tire for their dirt bath and use half dirt and half DiatomaceousEarth. We mix them lightly together and they take baths all the time!
Check out the photos below for the activities referenced above and contact us if you have any questions!
------
This post contains some affiliate links and I may be compensated, but all opinions are my own. This compensation helps with expenses to keep this blog up and running! Thank you for all your support!
Comentários