Make me feel better about penning my former free-rangers :(

[gandalf_of_chickens]

If you plan on making compost in your chicken run, then you need to dump in all kinds of organic litter you can get your hands on. Pine shavings will work, of course, but they will take a long time to compost by themselves. I don't use pine shavings as coop litter because I have better, free, options available.

My chicken run has no roof, just bird netting on top. I toss all my grass clippings, leaves, kitchen scraps, weeds from the lawn and garden, spent coop bedding, and just about anything else that I can get for free. I can get free wood chips at our local county landfill and that makes great brown material for composting, much like pine shavings, but you need a lot of greens like grass clippings to get that composting action to heat up.

I switched from using wood chips as deep litter in my chicken coop to using paper shreds I make at home for the past two winters. The paper shreds compost much faster than wood chips when I toss them out into the chicken run. They are also much lighter to scoop up and haul out than the wood chips. So, I have come to prefer using paper shreds in the coop. Also, it has almost eliminated the amount of paper products we haul off to the recycle center. That used to be the bulk of our "garbage" in days gone by. But, no more.

Whatever coop bedding you decide to use, it should be compostable when you toss it out into the chicken run. Personally, I would avoid coop litter such as sand because you won't get much composting benefit from it. I always try to find what I can get for free and use that as litter.

FYI, I live on a lake and have all the free sand in the world. But I found that it takes too much effort to keep the sand clean and I was constantly replacing soiled, smelly sand, with fresh sand. Using the deep litter or deep bedding methods with paper shreds, wood chips, etc... just works out so much better for me.

Thanks, my run is the same with bird netting on top. We have a paper shredder but don't use often enough to do the entire run floor in shreds. I will try to do a mixture of spent coop bedding (pine shavings), shredded paper, weeds, and whatever else I can find. Could I use bagged mulch? When the chickens were free-ranging they seemed to like scratching and sunbathing in the mulch under our bushes near the house.

I'm also finding that my chickens EAT all the kitchen scraps and grass clippings I put in the run, so that stuff isn't contributing to the litter compost!

 

[achiekitty]

Thank you so much for the encouragement! I'd like to do the compost idea. The run floor is dirt and I was planning to do deep bedding. What material would you recommend for a large outdoor space? Still pine shavings?

Where we live, we can get free wood chips from tree companies. They would dump a load in our driveway and we would slowly move them all over the property, including the chicken run. It also helps with avoiding the run getting muddy with all our California rains.


I’ve also received them from https://getchipdrop.com/. You can pay them to get the delivery sooner. But I’ve never paid and I get the wood chips within a few days.

You can use pine shavings, but the more diverse the bedding, the better the quality of your finished compost and better for the health of the chickens.

And I do add shredded paper from time to time also.

 

[NatJ]

I'm also finding that my chickens EAT all the kitchen scraps and grass clippings I put in the run, so that stuff isn't contributing to the litter compost!

Those things are still contributing to the compost. They are just going through the chickens first, which causes them to get ground up small (gizzard) and nicely moist and partly broken down (digestive enzymes and bacteria in the chickens' gut). That speeds up the composting process quite a bit

 

[Genene]

I don’t think the chickens really care. As long as they have food, water, a dust bath & some room to scratch, they’re good. They don’t obsess about things like humans do.

 

[aart]

They don’t obsess about things like humans do.

Well, I've had a few obsessive chickens, but yeah.

 

[MiMito3]

I saw in another thread somebody suggested just letting them out supervised for an hour or two before sundown if they are good about going back into their coop when its getting dark. That could be a possible option.