Flooring Over Hardware Cloth?

[Anon112]

Help me help my chickens, please!

Because of the location of my chicken run, putting an adequate apron around the outside is very hard. In the last year, the rats have decided they'd like to move in. Over the summer I put hardware cloth over the whole floor of the run to keep the rats from tunneling in. I felt triumphant . . . for a few months.

Fast forward to January. As the temperatures have dropped, the ground has frozen and pushed up inside the run. I had put about 4 inches of soil over the hardware cloth, but now the cloth is basically at the surface. Obviously this makes for a pretty hard landing coming down off of the roost.

My initial inclination was to go buy a bunch more dirt. But before I spend money and hours on that, is there something else I should do? I was considering getting something like weed barrier to lay over the cloth before laying down more soil.

Good idea? Terrible idea? Should I be doing something other than soil (mulch? straw?) over the hardware cloth? Obviously this time I will aim to have the soil cover be much deeper.

 

[GodLovesU]

Can you post a picture?

 

[StinkyAcres]

You definitely need to do something about the exposed hardware cloth; it's really not good for your chickens' feet. Since it didn't work, I'd remove it before it rusts and creates a bigger problem.

Do you keep the chicken feeder in the run? I'd recommend a treadle feeder if you're not using one already. @Al Gerhart makes one.

This past year the rats were AWFUL here. I finally beat them with a combination of things. I built a treadle feeder, set snap traps at night in covered locations (in the chicken coop, under the duck coop, in the compost piles, etc.), and brought my dogs out to catch a few. I also covered holes in my coop with hardware cloth and after I did that the rats would come in through the chicken door in the evenings. Some got caught in the snap traps on their own, but some nights I would close the chicken door to trap the rat inside, catch the rat by its tail (with gloves), and place it in the snap trap. Gotta do what you gotta do...

Just don't use poison as whatever eats the poisoned rats will die or at least get very sick. I haven't found the poison alternatives (like RatX) to be super effective, but you can try them.

 

[Al Gerhart]

Help me help my chickens, please!

Because of the location of my chicken run, putting an adequate apron around the outside is very hard. In the last year, the rats have decided they'd like to move in. Over the summer I put hardware cloth over the whole floor of the run to keep the rats from tunneling in. I felt triumphant . . . for a few months.

Fast forward to January. As the temperatures have dropped, the ground has frozen and pushed up inside the run. I had put about 4 inches of soil over the hardware cloth, but now the cloth is basically at the surface. Obviously this makes for a pretty hard landing coming down off of the roost.

My initial inclination was to go buy a bunch more dirt. But before I spend money and hours on that, is there something else I should do? I was considering getting something like weed barrier to lay over the cloth before laying down more soil.

Good idea? Terrible idea? Should I be doing something other than soil (mulch? straw?) over the hardware cloth? Obviously this time I will aim to have the soil cover be much deeper.

You can trap and poison and try to build a Fort Knox coop that rats can't get into but the single most effective and inexpensive method of getting rid of rats is to stop feeding them.

First check your feed use, a quarter pound of feed per bird per day, don't count roosters unless you have a lot of them. That tells you if the rats are getting to the feed. If there are more than one or two they are eating an unnatural source of feed. Natural environments will not support a rat colony for long, they will either remain in balance with natural food or colony collapse happens when they run out of food.

Sanitation is the first of three methods for rodent control. Bulk feed in metal barrels, clean up the pathways between the feed and where the rats are living so that natural predators will then them down constantly as they move around, and you need a treadle feeder.

The best rat proof treadle feeder has an inward swinging door, a narrow and distant treadle to prevent the rats from overwhelming the treadle, and it MUST have one or two strong springs that provide pressure to keep the door closed. You have to search for them, won't find one on Amazon where All of the products are made in China and not a single one is rat proof. And no plastic in the design, rats will chew through it quickly. Look at the negative reviews first and trust them more than the positive reviews.

Or build one like Stinky Acres suggested if you are on a tight budget. Even a wooden feeder will hold off the rats long enough that they will starve out and when they get holes chewed into them they can be patched. They do tend to swell up with moisture so take that into account whey you design it and build it.

It sounds like the rats are living under the hardware cloth, digging upward, and pushing the hardware cloth up. But, they are eating, they are in sufficient numbers to move that much dirt, figure out how they are getting to the food and end it. Don't think you can bring a feeder in at night, rats will happily eat during the day. But good luck with it. The chickens will start having foot problems if kept on hardware cloth, you are wise to reach out for help.

 

[Anon112]

Thank you so much for your replies.

For the most part, the hardware cloth is doing what it's supposed to do (the rats are helping me find the random gaps). The run is about 12 feet by 12 feet. The cloth that has been pushed to the surface is sort of an L-shape right in the middle of the run: imagine about 2 feet by 6 inches, then a sharp turn and another 2 feet by 6 inches strip.

The spot that's being pushed up is where the different pieces of hardware cloth overlap. I think that the dirt couldn't push up through the holes because of the overlap. For now, I've covered the exposed metal with a mountain of dirt.

That said, I think it is time to get a treadle feeder.