A while back I write about how this year’s crop of chicks (which have morphed into cheeky juveniles) were going into our neighbor’s yard. While we were not getting complaints (in fact, at one point they were happy to see the chickens because they knew that the birds would control the tick population), I knew that appreciating lowered ticks is one thing, chicken poop all over your backyard is quite another.
You have to really love your birds to not get upset about walking in chicken poop. We had to do something.
I started doing some research. There are many types of fences and netting out there and some of them can be pretty pricey.
After looking at the various options, my son Griffin and I settled on a cheap do-it-yourself solution. We bought 2 rolls of plastic fencing/netting (25 feet across – about $20/each) and enough wooden sticks to have a support roughly every 5 feet. (about $1 each) Griffin then took out the staple gun and went to work.
We had considered a more substantial netting but we didn’t want to keep it up in the winter, (our snows would have destroyed it) and trying to store something that was stiff would have been a bear. With this plastic netting, before the snows arrive, all we’ll have to do is roll it up and put it in the shed. It will be ready for next spring when/if we’ll need it again.
We didn’t need anything fancy, we just needed something that worked.
We are using the plastic netting as a sort of reminder to the chickens that they have to stay in our yard. If they really wanted to, they could go around or fly over it (3 feet tall) and walk to our neighbors, but so far, they haven’t figured that out. At some point we may fence in the entire backyard, as we occasionally find chickens in the front who are thinking about crossing our road, but for now, we’re happy with our inexpensive solution to what could have been an uncomfortable neighbor problem.
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FYI – this is why we didn’t want to consider any kind of string netting:
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Wendy Thomas writes about the lessons learned while raising children and chickens in New Hampshire. Contact her at [email protected]
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