Tuesday, January 20, 2015

Tips for Cleaning Your Chicken Coop

When it comes to cleaning your chicken coop, it's a chore you just have to do, even if you use the deep litter method, which minimizes how often you clean. But whether you use the deep litter method or not, these tips will help you get the chore done in the minimum amount of time with the minimum amount of fuss.

Use hay, not straw or pine shavings. Hay has less dust than pine shavings and is easier to manage -- and cheaper! -- than straw, and chickens love to eat the seeds. Cover your coop floor with hay and use it in the nest boxes, too.

Use roosting boards, removable poop trays, or tarps.  Most of your chickens' poop is going to be collected underneath the roosts, so if you can figure out a way to capture and easily remove the poop under the roosts, your job will be a lot easier. Some folks make trays that slide out easily and can be emptied on the compost pile. Others use a tarp slung on poles underneath the roosts. Whatever particular method you use, the point is to be able to easily clean under the roosts.

Make your roosts removable. When building your chicken coop, design it so that roosts either flip up easily out of the way or can be removed from the coop entirely. This makes it easier to rake or shovel out the entire coop when you clean it.

Slant the tops of nesting boxes. There's a chicken law: anywhere horizontal, a chicken will perch if she can. So make sure the tops of your nesting boxes have a slant to them to minimize or eliminate chickens, er, eliminating into the nest boxes.

Use a tarp. Some folks use a tarp underneath the entire coop (if it's small enough to allow for this). When cleaning time comes, you just pull out the tarp with all the bedding and poop on it, dump it in the compost, clean it off and reinstall it with fresh bedding on top.