Saturday, November 12, 2011

Wire Frame Over The Chicken Coop

I have built a wire frame/arch over the top of my chicken coop to grow Star Jasmine over it to provide the chicken coop with some much needed shade - oh and it smells AWESOME!
Last weekend I set out to build it but had a bit of a setback when one of the star pickets I was using fell down and hit me in the head which resulted in concussion.

Yesterday I got the job finished! It took about 2.5 hrs to get it done and I must say I'm actually happy with the resulting look, I just hope that it's strong enough to stay in place.

I got given the wire from a friend, it was sitting behind his mum's garage and it was just going to be thrown out - awesome! It was about 10-11m long and 70cm wide, so to cover the entire width of the chicken coop I had to cut 2x4m lengths and then join them side by side to make it 1.4m wide.
After doing that I then had to figure out how I was going to get the wire up onto the star pickets, on my own, which are at a height of 1.8m - string was the answer I came up with. I ended up running string between the star pickets to make a kind of net to try hold the wire up where I needed it until I had secured it to the star pickets. It worked wonderfully :D

After I had secured the wire in place and tried to re-shape it a bit I then had to work out where I was going to plant the two Star Jasmine plants so that they wouldn't be in the way of being able to clean the chicken coop and then run some more wire down to that spot to provide a climbing path up to the rest of the wire. That done and then the plants planted and this is the result

It was a bit hard to try to get photo's as the wire blends into the background a bit, which is good but you can see the star pickets to see how big it is



I didn't want the main bit of wire going all the way to the ground so that both myself and the chooks could get underneath it and that was mostly so that I still had room to clean out the coop

Star Jasmine


Chooks checking out the new plants and scratching around the pea straw mulch

My clothing after yesterdays efforts - nice and clean ;)

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