good fences make good chickens
I wrote last time I talked about fences that I had mostly sealed the chickens out of the garden. Of course, "mostly" is pretty useless when all it takes is a few minutes of chicken presence to do a whole lot of irrevocable damage. The thing with chickens is, they feel no shame, and they don't at all respect a boundary that doesn't physically prevent them from getting into something. That is to say, they can't be trained to get into the garden. And while they're not single-mindedly dedicated to trying, eight hens moving around for eight to ten hours a day are statistically likely to find their way in there. And then I get mad. So for the sake of our relationship I spent some more time working on fences—this time the tricky spot where the new deck meets the corner of the house. There will be a gate there, but there's a lot of other infrastructure to establish first: four posts and two fence segments in a space not much more than five feet across. It took a surprisingly long time, but I pretty much finished it off today. The gate itself is still a gleam in my eye, but at least now the doorway is easily blocked off by an old baby gate (we have the telescoping wooden ones because we're classy that way). Now the hens are at least 50% more likely to be good chickens.