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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  3d ago (text post)   461 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for February 25, 2025

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service

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You have two options: keep them in a coup and feed them or let them eat whatever they find in your backyard but leave them unprotected.

It's "free eggs" only if you don't have to buy chicken feed.

I suppose it wouldn't be impossible to put a cage or net over the entirety of your backyard, would it? Aesthetics would suffer, of course.

The visible stringers with foil on I talked about earlier are the easy way to do this. It'll cover any big gaps in your canopy cover: if there's an easy route in and out hawks will go for it. But they generally won't dive into something that looks suspicious.

I believe the "standard" practice in this situation is to use a movable chicken coup called a chicken tractor. You move the tractor from spot to spot in the yard as the chickens exhaust the forage the tractor is over. Feed would still likely be needed, though less. This is what @orthoxerox was referencing with the need for a movable enclosure.

The eggs may not count as "free range" if the chickens are raised this way, but it's arguably more humane than exposing them to predation. Chickens are a type of roosting fowl and tend to exhibit less stress if they have a place to safely roost at all times. As @SteveAgain mentioned modern chickens were bred from birds that can fly into tree tops to roost, it seems this instinct isn't completely gone with modern breeds, they just can't make it to tree tops.

I've always thought chicken tractors are a pretty bad kludge for having chickens on open pasture with no tree cover (and not much decent forage for them). They prefer woodland with lots of insects in rotting logs, which also protects them from hawks that rarely dive in without a clear exit strategy.

Chicken-scratching is how they find insects under a layer of fallen leaves and sticks. It's not a motion made for lawns.

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