Question regarding wire mesh on bottom

deegee68

In the Brooder
May 23, 2015
42
4
36
I have a question regarding burying some hardware cloth under the bottom. If my hens will sleep at night in the raised secured coop, do I need to protect the run area. I have added a picture of kind of what my coop looks like, but not exactly.

Also, if I do protect the whole area with hardware cloth, can I leave the pop door open at night?

Thanks,

I am on the final stretch of my coop build and it seems like I have a gazillion questions.
 
I am right there with you. I really want to bury HW cloth under the entire area of my run, simply because I live in farming country and we have many mice, field rats and gophers. It won't take much for one to burrow under even a "skirt" on the outside of the run.

The only problem that I'm finding is it will eventually start to rust, and then you have to worry about your chickens feet getting punctured when they're scratching.

Maybe I'm over thinking it, and they'll be fine without it, but it is really on my mind.



If you have the entire run encased in HW cloth, I think it's okay to leave the coop open to them at night. I plan on it, since it's so dang hot here, even at 3am....lol
 
What I ended up doing and I hope it will work is I have an old raised garden box that is 8x4, I dug some dirt out and laid hardware cloth on it and cover it with about 3/4 inch of sand. I will then place the coop and run which is smaller 6x3 on top of that and add another inch of sand into the run. If anyone has any suggestions please let me know. For some reason this part has me the most confused.
 

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