"Marshall Wilkinson" wrote in message
...

Fran Higham

Nope, I run my chooks an orchard of about a quarter of an acre. Just
make
sure it is fox proof. I've lost a lot of chooks and have spent a lot of
time and money on fixing up what was an abortion of a fence done by a
supposed expert fencer. Ha!

What sort of mesh do you recommend - we have foxes here.

Just use the standard chook wire, anything finer will cost you a lot more.
BTW, when you put the wire round the outside of the pen, you will need to
either dig a trench and bury the bottom well down OR you must lay it out in
a 'skirt' which stretches out along the ground AWAY from the pen - about a
metre will do. Foxes tend to dig but they are not smart enough to figure
that they must go back a metre and dig in from there. I prefer the skirt
option to the trench option as the wire doesn't rot for a long time and it
works better under the sort of pressure teat a determined fox can exert over
weeks of trying. Also, make sure that you use slabs of concrete or bricks
in the ground at the gate, foxes usually dig here first.

The fruit trees are 2 - 3 m tall and we plan to cover the top but are
still
working on a design. If we use hardwood posts what should the spacing
be
and
is chicken wire the best thing to use over the top/roof of the
orchard/chook
yard?

Gosh you must be very rich :-)) You don't need to put a top on the
whole
orchard,

Netting the top of the orchard would keep the birds from harvesting our
fruit, unless we net individual plants.

You will need to use bird wire for the whole of the pen if you want to keep
birds out and that will cost so much that you would be better off buying
eggs from a biodynamic producer who promises that the eggs are laid in
cotton wool and collected by robots dressed as milk maids :-)). It would be
much cheaper and less problems in the long run to use the really good
quality vineyard nets for each individual tree. Chicken wire will keep
silvereyes and other little birds out. The little birds aren't quite as
infuriating as the cockatoos but then they can do enormous damage and one
doesn't even notice the little rotters are there.

Chicken wire has about a 4-5 cm hole and bird wire has about a 1-2 cm hole.
There is a very good fence book called "Wires and Pliers" (no ISBN as it is
put out by the Kondinin Group) which you may be able to get on inter-library
loan.