Nice! Most good layers put out a lot of eggs(far more than the average house uses!), so if you stay on good terms with the neighbor, I don’t expect you’ll have to buy eggs for a long time, except maybe in winter if the coop isn’t heated.
Find some old chain link fencing and lay it on the ground in the coup/run. Water it in and with luck you can even get some grass to grow, the birds will keep it nipped down, and prevent predators from burrowing under.
I’ve never seen that done, we used to lay fencing outside the coop about 2’ wide, for the same purpose. Bury it or just lay it and let the grass grow through it and it will also keep burrowers out - they’ll try to dig right at the fence, they never try to tunnel in from afar.
the coup is under the shop, we have an area with about 6ft headroom that we built it into, wont get anything to grow
A falconer friend suggested it, it helps prevent their run from turning into a mud hole in the winter. He suggested taking gaff hooks or hay bale hooks and every so often pulling the chain link back to the surface. It gives the birds more to forage as the bugs crawl in the grass. But you have to provide an alternative for dust baths
Interesting. We used to store up a pile (small mountain) of dry leaves for the winter, and shovel them in 8-10” deep every couple weeks or so to keep the mud down. In the Spring, the leaf/manure mix was shoveled back out and tilled into the garden. It was a pretty good fertilizer, actually.
