Day 134
Free sawdust was a great and unexpected surprise. But when you have hordes of chickens, a fresh supply of clean and nice smelling bedding is needed. Pigs have a reputation of being messy farm animals, but in my opinion, chickens aren't far behind. They poop. A lot. I had tried to keep pace with the poop by doing regular cleanings. However, it just wasn't enough. I then decided to place hay bales under the roost to catch a fair amount of droppings. Eventually, these bales could just be placed in the yard and the chickens scratched and clawed them apart. This strategy definitely helped ease the cleaning. However, being new to the chicken world, I failed to factor freezing temperatures into the cleaning schedule. As hard as I tried to clean, the poop was even harder.
Literally.
Some days, the cleaning was futile and I needed to schedule my cleaning around above freezing temperature days. If there was a stretch where that didn't happen, the poop piled higher than I had ever wanted. Shoveling wheelbarrows full of soiled bedding wasn’t as bad as I had thought it would be using the deep litter method. It was a much needed winter workout and it gave us plenty of fuel for our gardening.
In our backyard, I used old stumps and part of the dilapidated fencing to create a makeshift compost pile. After one round of coop cleaning, it quickly filled up with a large and somewhat smelly wood chip and poop soup. I extended it even further and try to keep up with turning it over to help with the composting process but it is clearly a work in progress.
Practice makes progress so I continually look for ways to make coop cleaning easier and more efficient.
I made sure to cover the tops of the nesting boxes with repurposed wood as this became a favorite spot for many of the girls to roost at night. Using a plain scraper and a five gallon bucket, scraping this wood regularly made cleaning quick and easy and made transferring the poop to the compost pile pretty painless.
Cleaning up was getting easier.
Until a messier mess came around.
