Today is coop cleaning day. It's not a fun day, but you do get used to it after a while. Every so often you have to remove all the old bedding, clear out the cobwebs, sweep out the dust and dirt, and shovel out the manure. This all gets placed on the compost pile in the back, and then I let Mother Nature transform it into the best garden fertilizer in the world. Nothing--and I mean nothing--grows a garden better than chicken manure.
Wow--what a disaster! There is a TON of chicken poop spread throughout this litter. Several feathers are buried in there too. There are cobwebs, dust, and filth everywhere. It's time to clean up! First I remove the few things on the floor: the food bin, the hanging feeder, the water, and the board they like to lay their eggs behind. My chickens are weird. I made them beautiful little nesting boxes in the beginning, but they turned their little noses up to them. Instead, they prefer to hide behind a piece of old plywood and lay their eggs there. That way they figure I might not find them.
I use a regular garden shovel and begin shoveling out all the old bedding and manure. I toss it into a bin outside that I periodically bring to the compost pile as it fills up. This goes on for a while until I get the major mountains cleared up. Then I sweep away all the dust, cobwebs, and remaining litter. You can see the floor here. I put linoleum down when I first got this coop to try to protect the wood from their manure, but they have dug down and ripped a lot of it up. Chickens are very destructive!
Ah....now that looks much better! I put a couple of bales of clean pine shavings down. The gray areas you see are where I sprinkled on some food-grade diatamaceous earth. Diatamaceous earth is fossilized remains of diatoms, which is a kind of hard-shelled algae. It is a way to keep the insect population down. The fine powder absorbs lipids from the outer layer of insects' exoskeletons, which causes them to dehydrate and die. It is a very helpful and natural way to keep your chickens clear of the many bugs that would otherwise plague them.
Chickens are unbelievably nosy. It looks like a visitor has already decided to stop by, and I have barely even finished my work! She just wants to make sure that I'm taking good care of her house. Now this will keep the chickens good for another few months, and then come the January thaw, I'll be out in the coop again.
It's imperative to take care of your animals. You must make sure they have access to good food, clean water, and comfortable bedding. Filthy lice-invested areas are just a recipe for misery for your animals. Having said that, there are people who go overboard. I know some people who clear out a coop every few days! That is unnecessary and simply wasteful. I know one woman who goes in every morning after her chickens go out for food and removes a board she places under their roosts to catch their poop every night! Wow. I'm not going to do that. During the winter, if the weather gets really cold as it does here in Maine, sometimes I will add some clean pine shavings right on top of the old stuff. Believe it or not, all of that old manure can help to keep a coop a little warmer in the winter. As long as the weather's not too bad, I clean out every three or four months or so.
Chickens absolutely adore straw, but I never give it to them. Straw has a tendency to mold, and mold is the enemy of chickens. Always remember this! They have very delicate respiratory systems (hence all these "bird flus" you hear about), and mold can actually kill them. So, much as they love straw, they get clean pine shavings from me. As long as you have good ventilation (vents up at the top of the coop--always open 365 days a year), the pine will not bother them. They also love to bury themselves in the fresh new shavings. Chickens are strange critters.
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