chickens vs the garden, housing run advice needed

[braid]

Hi I'm confused on how best to house 6 chooks. At the moment they are in an immobile 11ft by 11ft run with a wooden house. I let them out to free range. We have a big garden, about acre and a half. I know in the spring they will annoy me digging up veg and plants so I will need to contain them but think the permanent run will be miserable. Should I fence off a big area of garden? How big would it need to be to avoid it becoming a mud run. Alternatively I could put them in eglu cube with run and move it around but that would feel v restrictive. I like seeing them scratching around the place. What would you do please? All involves more money of course.

Oops don't know how I managed to do 3 threads. brain gone again. apols

Fence the veg garden off?

Yes but they go into my neighbours too so I'm going to have to do a lot of fencing to stop them wrecking their garden too. We have sheep fencing they can get under in a lot of places. I also wander about finding their eggs in such a large garden if they continue to free range over it all. That's why I'm thinking of a chook paddock type thing.

we are thinking of fencing off half our large garden with temporary netting - the kind that's put up round building works and festivals etc and attached to spikes - seem some in green on ebay. we hope we can keep moving it aorund like a large moveable play pen - for proper fencing we'd need about 50ft to cover half the garden. the egg laying is a problem, we let our free range over the whole garden last summer and found 30 eggs in a plant in the autumn!

Don't have hens now, but used to have bantams - free range in a large garden (my parents'!)

They were fenced out of the veg garden - 1' chain link round the bottom or chicken wire, to go below/behind the fruit trees...

One hen made a friend of the stallion next door (in the stud) and sometimes laid her egg in his manger.

We regularly had to go looking for nests - normally managed to follow sneeky broody back before it was too late - and the dog normally knew where they were if we asked her.

We're half-heartedly contemplating hens here - if we do we'll have to have a small moveable coop and run and have them in nearly all the time due to the level of cats and foxes.

11 x 11ft run is massive!!!!

But, if you really want to let them loose, buy some chicken netting and fence off the areas you don't want them in.

If you have any borders with just shrubs in, fence them IN with some water and they'll weed it for you!

Thanks for all the advice. (Slow to reply as my one year old has been poorly.) I'm going to get the chicken netting and create a moveable run area for them. Too many areas to fence off to let them run around the whole thing. The old run is going to become a fruit growing area as it has bird netting over the top and I only need to add netting to the sides. Raspberries like chicken poo ground don't they? thanks again

Our chooks have always free ranged around the garden - they have no enclosure at all. But, we now have nearly 20 of them and have decided to make a chook area in the garden and mostly keep them in there.

We've set aside a section which is about 60ft square. It has trees and undergrowth, shade and sun and I reckon they'll be very happy there.

Free ranging has been very successful - and we haven't had too many problems with free range nests (yet!)

We also didn't have terrible trouble with garden damage. They only thing we had to plan for was once we'd planted out seedlings, they'd have a good old scratch round and dig them back up. We've covered them with cloches or netting and all has been fine.