So here on the homestead we've built a log cabin
we have an outdoor oven a blacksmith shop and just recently we completed digging our well we
want to add livestock to the homestead so today's project is building a pen for our new chickens.
What are we going to build our fence out of if it was a modern day we would use some metal fence
posts and poultry netting or chicken wire goes up really quick keeps the chickens in perfect thing.
We don't have that in our 18th century time period so we're gonna build ours out of the materials
around us we're gonna build it with out of sticks basically but we need a special kind of stick
we need something that's strong and flexible and the right size and doesn't have a doesn't branch
off really quickly so around here on this piece of property in every piece of property is going
to be different but what we've got a lot of is willow number one willow's a good possibility
for our fence it grows in nice big long sticks without very many branches and we need to go at
least three feet if not six feet without a branch occasionally this has a branch here
while it's still green it's pretty flexible and we can use this we can make it do a lot
of different things for us without it just sort of snapping off our willow isn't the best though
it's not the probably the very best choice in our situation we will harvest some of this willow and
it just grows in big banks right along the pond here we have lots and lots of willow to work with
but it's kind of a brittle uh willow some willows are much better than others it hybridizes
really quickly what we want is something a little more flexible a little less brittle.
Here's another possible choice now we've got these big kind of thickets of this little tree doesn't
grow very big grows about maybe eight foot tall max and the sticks don't get any bigger than about
three quarters inches in diameter and then it kind of stops growing and keeps kind of building a
bigger and bigger sort of colony of these I don't know maybe they grow underground I'm not sure
this is I believe silver dogwood um really nice and flexible again
grows in a nice stick about five to six feet tall without too many branches or any really
this is like this stick would be perfect for uh what we're building up there
we'd cut it off about here and again it just grows and grows and grows grows in these
big patches so it's something that's prolific we want something that you know there we need a lot
of sticks so we need something that just naturally grows in a big group like this.
This is probably the tree that we're going to use the most and this is an ash tree now
something interesting happened about 10 or 15 years ago a wave of emerald ash borer a pest
came into our area and killed all our ash trees it took a little while four, five,
ten years depending on the tree but basically killed all the trees well kind of what happens
is an emerald ash borer comes in it bores a hole lays an egg under the bark of the tree
the little larva goes around it eats that inner bark kills the main tree but it leaves behind
the living roots those those bores don't go under and kill the roots so the roots of all our trees
stayed alive and what happened was it created a natural coppicing effect and a coppice is where
you cut down a particular species of tree and it sends up shoots and you'll see shoots all
around the stump of the tree and you can kind of train those and they because the roots are still
very very healthy it sends up very quick shoots and they tend to be long and straight
and flexible depending on the species so we have lots and lots on this particular piece of property
probably more than a thousand of these ash trees that have died the main trunk and then it's sent
up all these straight shoots we can cut those off they'll continue to produce so this ash tree I
can probably just keep cutting and cutting and as long as I don't cut it all the way off and try to
kill those roots it'll just keep sending up shoots and we can keep using them for different projects.
Well we've got most of the upright posts put in place kind of made this a semi-circular design
because it'll make it easier to put up the wattle. If you come up to a 90 degree angle
it's a lot harder to make these sticks go around the corner so if you just make it one nice
big circle makes it really easy to do. We've got very nice bendy sticks about as big around
as my thumb or maybe a smaller round as my pinky and they just get woven in and out of
these stakes like a giant basket so really we're just making a really really big chicken basket.
This is going to be the doorway or the gateway into the fencing area and I wanted that same kind
of feel so I just built this really quick frame out of the same kind of material that the chicken
house is made out of and then we just did a quick interior with the with the waddle and it'll have a
nice look to it and the bars will keep a little bit further apart so we can see in see what's
going on maybe late in the afternoon we'll let the chickens kind of roam free and then right
at sunset they'll naturally go into the chicken house so I think this is going to look really good
so was it difficult I've never done a project quite like this one before
certainly not as much as this I have worked with this material so I had a kind of a feel for it
but it worked up pretty intuitively you know just seeing a couple pictures of that
and it went together without any real issues at all just a whole lot of doing the same thing
over again go out and find the sticks that you need come in and weave them into place.