Hi everyone! I have raised chickens since I was little off and on and just started up again last year I live where it gets pretty cold so I have a 20'x 20' enclosure inside my barn I let them free range in the day till they go in.I have 8 nesting boxes and 16 chickens. in the winter i have a heated water dish and i put a small elec heater i keep on threw the winter at a med setting. I also chop lettuce and tomatoes, cucks and grapes, i just pick them up at the store for a cheap deal cause I take there not so good stuff. plus the scratch, oyster shell and mash. They are grea pets and each have thier own personality, they are fun I sell the eggs for 1.00 a dozen.

Enjoy your chickens! And that business about keeping 'just a few'...Ha! :) I started out with three and very quickly succumbed to Chicken Addiction. *G* As for covering the coop/run, I'd provide a solid roof over part of it to protect the birds from wind, weather & sun. You can cover the outdoor part with hardware cloth (please never use chicken wire, it is way too flimsy and won't stop a predator, plus the large holes freely allow vermin to come and go), but with the current climate of Bird Flu hysteria you might want to seriously think about covering the entire run with a solid roof. We are building a new run right now and it's going to have a corrugated steel roof. It will also help to keep out diseases & problems that are carried in wild birds' poop, such as parasites. Where we are, we see the writing on the wall that is going to demand that chicken owners show that their birds are housed in such a way as to protect them from wild bird-borne disease, or risk the government coming in and killing your flock. :( Velvet ~:>

Building a coop that looks Japanese would be what I would do to integrate it. You could also screen it with fencing and/or planting. Traditional Japanese gardening is formalized and stylized nature, with sheared trees and shrubs, raked gravel, groupings of rocks etc. used to represent things seen elsewhere in the world - like wind-blown wild trees on the coast or dwarfed ones on mountain tops, islands in the sea and so on. Nothing casual about it at all, as far as creating and keeping one goes. But you could certainly come up with something evocative or suggestive of Japanese gardening, if your thinking lends itself to that. Visit other gardens during openings/tours and look at books and web sites showing and describing the kind of thing you are pondering. Years ago there was one around called I believe A Japanese Touch for Your Garden, if a used book outlet has that it may have some ideas for you.

It sounds like your girls aren't roosting if they only have 2 1/3-3 ft of height, so if the walls are draft free and they have bedding on the floor to keep their feet warm you may not need any additional heat during the short freezing temps. Their body heat may be enough to keep them warm but it depends on the overall square footage of the coop. My neighbor has a large coop and run, without additional heat, and her chickens were happily outside scratching around in the snow and ice we had a couple years ago (Portland). The link below is my favorite place to discuss chickens, ducks, etc. I used to have quail and the members there are happy to share their knowledge! Here is a link that might be useful: Backyard chickens