Free Guide · The Full Chicken City Tour
One hundred and sixty square metres, twenty five chickens, and not a single element that only does one job.
What does an integrated chicken run actually look like? A central courtyard where the chickens always live, a chicken house in the middle of it, and separate rooms coming off it that can be opened or closed to the birds: a berry corridor, two annual veggie rooms and a fruit room. The whole thing sits under one predator-proof mesh roof, and the chickens are rotated between the rooms depending on what is growing.
This is Chicken City, filmed in summer. My chickens never leave this compound, and I am comfortable with that because it is big enough and varied enough to keep them genuinely happy, while keeping them safe from the foxes, dogs and eagles we have plenty of here.
If you are planning something much smaller, most of what follows still applies. The principles do not scale down badly.
Watch
The whole tour, in summer
Starting from above so you can see the layout, then through every room, including the ones that have changed since I last filmed here.
The layout, from above
In the middle is the chicken house with the pitched roof, and around it the chicken courtyard. Going clockwise from the solar panel: the annual veg room, the berry cage in the corner by the greenhouse, then the large fruit room, and finally the second annual veg room, which has been comprehensively taken over by raspberries. I do not intend to fight it.
The courtyard is home base and the chickens are always in it. The rooms have gates, and I open and close them through the year depending on what is growing.
The courtyard
You come in through a double gate, so nobody escapes. This is where the food and water live and where the girls spend their days.
It was only ever meant to be for the chickens, and then I could not help myself and filled it with edible plants, which turned out to be the best thing I did to it. When I first built this I had shade cloth over the top to keep everyone cool in summer. The plants have replaced it entirely.
The question that changed the whole garden
Why would I have shade cloth when I could have a feijoa tree? Once you start asking that about every functional thing in a garden, the answers get much better.
So the courtyard now has a feijoa, a fig, a lemon, a lemonade tree, a blackberry growing along the coop wall, and passion fruit in two corners.
The passion fruit is the one I would push hardest. It climbs, so once the root base is protected and it is up off the ground the chickens cannot touch it. It gives brilliant shade while getting brilliant sun itself, which is why mine is teeming with fruit. And it is evergreen, so the coverage does not disappear in winter. One thing to know: they only fruit for about seven years, and then you rip it out and plant another. I have done that once, and there was one sad year without a big vine.
Citrus is a heavy feeder, and the ones in here are constantly being fed by chickens walking around them. Put mine beside the citrus elsewhere on the property with no chickens under it and there is no comparison. Incidentally, chickens are not meant to eat citrus, and I have found they are very good at knowing what they can and cannot eat, so I have no qualms about growing it in with them.
I have a rough policy in here: the strongest edible plant wins. If you are giving me fruit like the passion fruit is, you can go nuts.
The compost bays
Two bays sit in the courtyard, currently full and ready to use. They double as a protein dispenser: dig down a little and there are worms, and the chickens lose their minds over them. You have to dig, because the worms are not stupid and do not sit at the top waiting.
The lids used to worry me, because a strong wind had blown one down before and could have hit a chicken. They now have safety hooks so that when they are up, they stay up.
The chicken house, and three upgrades that stuck
This is where they sleep and lay. Three things in here have changed since I last filmed it, and all three were improvements.
Bedding. I used to use straw in the house and I have changed my mind entirely. It is now the compressed pine pellets sold as horse bedding, occasionally as cat litter. Buy it as horse bedding and it is far cheaper. They go down as pellets, break down into a sawdusty material as they absorb, and keep the house genuinely dry. I only change it about every nine months.
Roosting bars. I had beautiful wooden branches harvested from around the property, and I loved them, and the chickens on the top roost pooed onto the ones below, and I hated cleaning them. They are now much less attractive: corner braces and scraps of wood, angled so the birds can climb to the top but nobody is directly above anybody else. Function won.
A permanent sick bay. I used to keep the sick bay cage up in a shed, and then learned that when you want a sick bay you want it immediately. It now lives in the chicken house full time. A bird who is unwell or injured can be set up with her own food and water, stay in sight of her friends so she still feels at home, and be safe from being pecked or bullied. If she needs medication in her water, she is the only one drinking it. With twenty five chickens, it gets used more than you would like.
The berry corridor
This room does two jobs at once, which is very much the theme.
It is home to four chickens who need a bit more care than the main flock of about twenty, who can get rowdy and competitive around food. Little Rosie lives in here, who was meant to be a girl and grew up to be a rooster, which is why the two roosters are kept apart at all times. I know exactly who would win, and it is not Little Rosie.
It is also where the caneberries are: loganberries, tayberries, blackberries and boysenberries along the walls, with the internal mesh acting as the trellis. The canes are roughly tied up with string and chains, high enough that the chickens get the low fruit and I get the bulk of it. Some for them, most for us.
We harvested in here the day before filming: four of us, over an hour, kilos and kilos of fruit out of a corridor about six metres long. Nothing gets fed anything extra. The chickens fertilise it daily, there is never a weed under the canes, and the mesh roof means no wild birds get there before we do.
The canopy they make also shades the little pallet house I built for those four chickens. That corner used to have shade cloth over it. Now the loganberries do it, which I would take every time.
Also on the channel
The secret behind the berry room
There is a trick to berries and chickens, and without it you get no canes and no fruit. It has its own video, because it deserves one.
The short version: the root ball that throws next year's canes has to be protected, or the chickens take every new shoot at the onset and the plant never regenerates. Wire around the base, and they can peck the leaves that come through without doing real damage.
One warning if you are tempted by a berry room. They need a serious prune in winter and you have to get it right or you lose next season. The rule is simple enough: once an arm has fruited it will never fruit again, so that one comes off, and the arms that have not fruited yet are next year's crop and stay. Pruned properly the whole room looks completely naked, and that is correct. Berries are one of the easiest edible crops there is, as long as you are committed to that job.
The annual veg room
The biggest room, and the one that does the heavy lifting on food. Zucchini, tomatoes, lettuce, beans, pumpkin, capsicum, salad. It turns over roughly every six months and can produce tens of kilos over summer and autumn, possibly hundreds.
The rotation is the whole system. Plant in spring, grow through summer, harvest hard. At the end of autumn when the crops are spent, I open the gate and the chickens come in and demolish what is left: the plants, the dropped fruit, the weeds, the seeds in the soil that would otherwise become next season's weeds. They churn it and eat it, and they take about a month to turn the entire space over. Then I lock them out and plant the winter crops. Cabbage, kale, salad greens, coriander, parsley. Ten years of that cycle, and the soil is prepared and the weeding is done without me.
Strawberries, and the pallet that fixed them
Strawberries are the exception in an annual room, because they fruit for three or four years. They live in self-watering pots so that I can physically carry them out before the chickens come in, which is the only reason they survive the rotation at all.
I do not love growing in pots generally, but strawberries do well in these, and they are on a dripper on a timer so I never think about them. The thing that actually transformed the crop was height. On the ground they were not getting enough sun and not giving me much fruit. I built a stand, which is literally a pallet, put them up on it, and got dramatically more fruit. If your strawberries are not fruiting, try lifting them.
It has completely ruined the walkway. I will take food over mobility every time.
The other strawberry method here is the vertical wall, which is the same principle again: get them up, out of reach, and into the sun, while making a wall do something. They are not as happy as the ones in the self-watering pots, and the wall gets very hot, so it is all on irrigation. You win some and you lose some, and you find out by trying.
Nasturtiums, doing four jobs
There are nasturtiums through the whole annual garden as a cover crop. When tomatoes go in there is a lot of bare soil between them, and bare soil grows weeds. The nasturtiums cover it and suppress them.
Then, being nasturtiums, the leaves and flowers are edible for us, and if we do not eat them the chickens will, and if the chickens do not, the goats certainly will. One plant, four uses.
Not every weed is a weed
A lot of what comes up unplanned in here is something I introduced in a previous season. There is mizuna coming up as a volunteer, and mustard leaf, both of which are excellent salad greens. So I leave those and harvest them. Just because you did not plant it there does not mean it is not something you could eat. The genuine weeds get pulled and thrown to the chickens, which is its own small pleasure.
Between the berries, the annual room and the fruit trees, this place hands over an enormous amount of produce and almost none of it needs anything done to it beyond salt. Which is more or less why there are five blends rather than one.
Alyce's Favourite
All five blends, one box
Alyce's Flavour Bombs Starter Pack
Every blend in one box, for everything a garden like this hands you.
Shop the Starter PackThe raspberry room, formerly annual veg room two
This was supposed to be the second annual veg room. The raspberries had other ideas and took the whole thing over. Raspberries spread relentlessly, and the abundance is such that I have stopped objecting.
The fruit room
The large corner room, and where the chickens spend most of the year, because there is nothing sensitive in here for them to ruin. Cherries, apples including espaliered ones trained along the mesh, plums, and herbs through the understory: spearmint, chives, sage.
They weed under every tree, they clear the fallen fruit before it can bring fruit fly, and they fertilise the whole thing constantly. These trees comprehensively outperform the fruit trees elsewhere on the property that do not have chickens under them.
The supporting cast
Chicken City sits inside a paddock, and the paddock has Remy the goat, his little sister, and Big Tony the pony in it. They keep the grass down, deal with the invasive blackberry, and their manure goes into the compost. They are also part of why this is such a busy, well-patrolled corner of the property.
Frequently asked questions
How big is Chicken City?
About 160 square metres, holding roughly twenty five chickens across the courtyard and the rooms coming off it.
Do the chickens ever leave it?
Never. It is big enough and varied enough to keep them happy, and it keeps them safe from the foxes, dogs and eagles we have plenty of here.
What is the best bedding for a chicken house?
I have switched from straw to compressed pine pellets sold as horse bedding. Far more absorbent, and I change it about every nine months.
What is the best shade plant for a chicken run?
Passion fruit, by a distance. It climbs out of reach, it is evergreen so the shade lasts all year, and it fruits heavily. Just know it only fruits for around seven years before it needs replacing.
Can you grow vegetables in a chicken run?
In separate rooms with gates, yes. Locked out while the crop grows, let in when it is spent so they clear, turn and fertilise it for the next planting.
Do you need a sick bay?
If you keep a decent number of birds, I would say yes, and keep it in the chicken house rather than a shed. When you need one you need it immediately.
Building your own version of this?
I have been refining Chicken City for over ten years and I share what works, what failed, and what I would do differently. Come along for the rest of it.
Go deeper on any room
How to build a predator-proof chicken run is the structure: mesh gauges, the roof edge, and how far the walls go underground.
The best chicken coop design is the argument for doing it this way at all, including the room rotation.
How to protect plants from chickens covers the bricks, baskets and wire rings holding every planted room together.
How to stop chickens destroying your berry plants is the berry corridor in detail.
How to stop your chicken coop smelling is the courtyard floor and where all that compost comes from.
Chicken coop ideas worth copying has the small additions: the trapdoor, the misting, the pallet boardwalk and the double gate.
Chicken City, the details has the layout and rough plans to work from.
Watch next
How it was built
If the tour has you planning one, this is the construction video: the mesh, the joins, the buried walls and the ten year verdict.
