Like I said, so far only the one time, but they've only been in there for a little over two months now. We cleaned it out after 6 weeks, mainly to see how the structures were doing under the bedding, and sort of as a ceremony in anticipation of our first egg layers coming online. Here are some pics of the coop after cleaning, and after refilling it with bedding.Wow, vehve, that's very thorough! Do you ever need to empty the whole coop, or is that short, daily routine all the coop cleaning you do?
When we emptied the stuff out, it was still completely dry, and didn't put out a bad odor. The peat moss that we mostly have in there (together with about 1/3 of pine shavings) really ties up smell nicely. I also wanted to get the stuff out of there to get a composting experiment going with it. I think we'll clean it a bit before winter the next time. I should be getting a huge load of hemp bedding in a few weeks, so I'm going to start adding a bit of that in there to compensate whatever we lose when picking the visible poops from under the roost. It should put out less dust than the peat, and be more absorbent and quicker composting than the pine shavings.
*Edit* The most important factor when I designed the coop was that it was to be easy to maintain, I really didn't want awkward working positions or a lot of unnecessary work. I can fit a wheelbarrow under the service door you see open in these pictures, and the board comes loose, so I can just scrape everything out. I did find it better to use a bucket though, because that way I could layer the stuff into the compost better, filling some preprocessed compost in between each bucketfull and wetting the layers.
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I just finished their run so I'm not sure yet how I'm going to manage that. Maybe put down some homemade wood chips once the grass is gone.
