EmmaDonovan
Free Ranging
I was reading in another thread that someone's hens ate bits of metal they found in the dirt and passed away. The house where I live is nearly 70 years old and the backyard has been used for who knows what over the decades. We find all kinds of things in the dirt including broken safety glass and tiny screws.
We haven't built our coop yet, we're still designing it. It should have about 128 sq ft of run. The hens will not be able to free-range because of predators. We have burrowing rodents here so we plan on digging down about a foot and laying hardware cloth across the entire bottom of the run so the rodents cannot borrow under and come up inside the coop to get at food, etc.
Since we're going to be displacing about 128 cu ft of earth anyway, should we replace it with something else, so we know there won't be any glass or metal bits? If so, does anyone have recommendations of what we could replace that dirt with?
Note: we're in the desert so it's not like this is gardening soil, it's very dry, sandy dirt, and rocks (see attached picture for an example) and we'll just be spreading whatever we remove from the run across the yard.
We haven't built our coop yet, we're still designing it. It should have about 128 sq ft of run. The hens will not be able to free-range because of predators. We have burrowing rodents here so we plan on digging down about a foot and laying hardware cloth across the entire bottom of the run so the rodents cannot borrow under and come up inside the coop to get at food, etc.
Since we're going to be displacing about 128 cu ft of earth anyway, should we replace it with something else, so we know there won't be any glass or metal bits? If so, does anyone have recommendations of what we could replace that dirt with?
Note: we're in the desert so it's not like this is gardening soil, it's very dry, sandy dirt, and rocks (see attached picture for an example) and we'll just be spreading whatever we remove from the run across the yard.
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