Floor Material for Small Coop and Run

[tridentk9]

Thank you for your encouragement! We are very new to this. Will they dig for dust to dust bathe or do I need to provide something? We got our first egg today

!

Go to Craig's List and find something to use as a container. Dishpan, kid's sandbox, shallow horse feeder. You can add food grade diatomaceous earth to clean sand to help protect against external parasites. The Diatomaceous Earth (DE) is usually cheapest at a feed store in the livestock section - very important- make sure it's food grade. It comes in big bags but is usually less than $20 for enough for years and years. Garden section isn't food grade and is dangerous for your pets. Pet section is $10 for 16 oz!

 

[faro]

Thank you

 

[Bob1313]

Dirt is good. If it gets muddy after a rain storm, you can throw down some pine shavings, even that from inside the coup. Rake it up every once in a while and toss it in the compost pile. Cheap and easy and one less thing to buy.
After years of drought, we got a big rainstorm, and the pine shavings dried it up quickly.

 

[GardenFae]

I'm also new to the whole chicken thing but I settled on un-dyed natural pine chip mulch for both my coop and my run. I had a couple of reasons:

1. Cost. Pine bark mulch and shredded pine chip mulch are the cheapest things I can buy at Home Depot. I live in the city, so while I have plenty of suppliers to choose from a lot of them have jacked up prices as many people use sand/straw/pine mulch solely for landscaping and decorative purposes and will pay the premium on them.

2. Composting. I wanted something that would break down relatively well (small dry pieces of pine being scratched by chickens turn into even smaller pieces pretty quickly, the larger ones add some texture to the mix and break down more slowly) and be easy to scoop out of the coop when needed. I'm planning on using the Deep Litter method, which doesn't work well in pure sand (although yes, cleaning sand is easy). Straw is a pain to shovel/fork. Wood chips are easy to shovel, sweep, and otherwise move around and they compost decently. The decaying wood on the bottom layer of the run has the added benefit of drawing in some of the bugs that would otherwise be bothering my garden. The chickens love scratching and finding those little morsels!

3. Appearances/cleanliness. Straw to me looks way too messy outside a nest box and I don't love the look of sand in coops (but that's personal preference). Un-dyed mulch looks good to me, smells good (fresh pine, yum!), and if it gets tossed outside the run by excited chickens it blends right into the dirt (I'm planning on mulching the entire area around the coop anyway and using chicken-friendly potted plants to keep it looking good). It doesn't stick to chicken feet either! My soil is loamy clay and it doesn't drain so bare dirt isn't an option. It helps that I have a roofed run so the area stays relatively dry, which means I'm not as worried about drainage, although I did consider sand before I decided to roof the run and do deep litter.

I'll probably use straw only in my nest boxes, but we'll see how it goes.

 

[chick n goat ma]

A couple of cookie trays with about an inch deep natural clay kitty litter placed under their sleeping perch(where 90% of their poop drops over night) in the coop makes clean up easy, I just scoop it out daily and chuck it on the Florida sand.(Florida is one big sand bar) it fertilizes, along with the goats poop and improves the quality of the soil the1,500 sq ft pen is now soil and grass grows well there along with whatever the weeds etc. the wind blows in. For the rest of the coop I use pine shavings on the floor and straw for their nesting boxes. The chickens free range in the pen from dawn to dusk, where they are safe from predators and the goats free range on the 1.5 acres of pasture and trees.

 

[anitaschickens]

I use sand as well in my coop. Best thing I could have done, makes it so easy to keep clean and it will not harbor bacteria if it is kept clean and dry.

 

[Daisyschickens]

I too use sand in the run over cement pavers and pine shavings in the coop and nesting box. I get the "Play" sandbox sand that's been washed and safe for my grandkids, so safe for my chickens too. It's easy to rake clean and the chickens love to scratch and bathe in it.

 

[tracecom]

Thank you for your encouragement! We are very new to this. Will they dig for dust to dust bathe or do I need to provide something? We got our first egg today

!

I am thinking of using a low profile tire for my dust bath container. My local tire store probably has a worn out one they will give me.

 

[Bob1313]

Bark can be slow to decompose, that is why it makes a wonderful mulch. The large pieces seem to take almost forever. One of the "rules" for successful composting is to mix brown and green equally or leaning towards green. The brown would be the wood shavings, straw, etc. Green is stuff like grass clippings and kitchen waste. If you end up with a significant amount of shavings and straw from the coop/run, like we did with our flock of around 100 birds, gathering up enough of the green might become a bit of a problem. I had to go back to using the grass catcher, which significantly adds to the effort of mowing our acreage. The end product is certainly worth the effort though.

 

[poultryshow]

Yes its ok if you put sand on concrete.