Thoughts on uncovered coop run flooring?

[PhipN FarmGirl]

>>Question for you experts after seeing this setup. For the external uncovered area seen, would sand be a better option or hay? Which would be a better option to keep the flies and smell minimized? Any other advice is also welcome.<<

We have sand in top of coop and run. With very rainy springs and humid summers, there are some things I do to minimize the smell:

-Scoop the poop daily with a long handled kitty litter scoop. Poop goes in compost.
-Add StallFresh once a month.
-Rake the sand every few days, helps it dry faster.
-Keep run covered, year round, otherwise the snow and rain will turn sand hard, and it will also wash it away.

We raised our coop floor about 8 inches and added French drain bed last year to help with drainage, sand stays much fresher this way.

Sand bonus for your hens: Crickets love sand, tasty snacks for your girls.

 

[tamdeva]

Hey there everyone,
I have a questions regarding what type of outdoor floor bedding I should use for my specific location and setup that I have.

We now live in Layton Utah which is North of Salt Lake City. Currently renting so this setup is somewhat temporary. I have 4 hens in a 10x10 chain link dog kennel with a 36 sq.ft. (fits 5-6 chickens) Chicken Coop within it. The top of the dog kennel is currently covered with bird netting only and in the summer will cover it with a black shade mesh type tarp (not sure what it is called but we used it in the past to shade our puppies in Nebraska during the summer). Within the coop I am using Pine wood chips which is working out pretty good since cleaning doesn't take but 15 minutes.

The problem occurs outside the covered coop within the confines of the 10x10 kennel. As expected the chickens have killed the grass and now it is just soil. While there was snow and ice on the ground things weren't so bad but now that it has has melted away there is a nice mud mess. I can only image what this will be like once spring hits. Drainage doesn't seem to bad, there is one small shallow pit area that I can easily fill in to level out. The area is sloped so there wouldn't be standing water once those low areas are filled.

Weather in this area... Snow in the winter with bouts of dry warm weather that melts the snow. Spring is rainy and things tend to mud up. Summers are hot and dry (85-100).

Attached is a picture of what we got going on. The black tiles you see was just a quick easy idea to keep cold from blowing under the coop during some really cold nights. Those will be gone soon.

Oh forgot to mention that we do let them out each day for anywhere from 2 to 4 hours depending on what we got going on.

I have been reading about people raving about using sand and then I have heard others doing just fine with hay.

Question for you experts after seeing this setup. For the external uncovered area seen, would sand be a better option or hay? Which would be a better option to keep the flies and smell minimized? Any other advice is also welcome.

Thanks in advance!

View attachment 1662015

I bought 11 hens from a poultry farm in our area (Kingman AZ), and he used sand. Most of his coops/pens were covered or inside a building with dirt flour with sand. Seemed to work great, he was able to rake up the poop and leave the sand. He had lots of chickens too! Even a hatchery. I have some sand waiting to be put in my coop right now, as the dirt seems to be disappearing with each cleaning. My chickens have a 20 X20 covered fenced pen for safety and then a big fenced only yard next to the garden. In fall and winter they get free run of the garden too! I use shavings and DE & the layering method in the coop, cleaning completely out in spring & fall. But I think the sand inside the coop only, will help.

 

[aart]

Seemed to work great, he was able to rake up the poop and leave the sand.

Arizona or other desert type place would be the only place I would use sand...it's dry, so no stink.

 

[paintedChix]

If you are renting or plan on selling, I really don't recommend sand. Most landlords or new owners will not be happy with the sand and removing it could be quite a hassle (for me it would be back breaking work that is difficult to do).

Each state/each situation is different.

Here in the sandhills of North Carolina, we have 21 acres of sand. OH. MY. GOSH. It's awful. Nothing or very little grows (scrub weeds, crab grass. In areas with trees - scrub oak, holly, some pine - both short & long needles). Only insects in the sand areas are ants and most of those are the fire ant types. We have ponies in pens & paddocks sandwiched in a perimeter fenced 7 acre pasture. We had chickens free ranging there, but they have a tendency to disappear either on their own or with the help of predators (shoot - even some of my ponies used to delight in running chickens down, ). The plain sand SMELLS BAD. It's had all kinds of livestock and crops & chemical fertilizers over the last 50 years on it. It always seems to return to sand (though from the way it was cared for, the sand was never really amended or fertilized to become decent soil). Coops and chicken pens set up on the sand - smell bad whenever the sand gets wet. An indoor dog going out in that sand and just rolling once - coming in - smells bad. Rotten egg, putrid, kinda' bad.

So enter BYC & learning about DLM. Our coops/pens/runs/nesting boxes all now get leaves, small branches, pine straw - both still attached to limbs/fresh and raked up after falling off trees, weeds, garden debris, veggie & fruit scraps to include the stuff you "aren't" supposed to feed chickens (make sure they free range or have free choice feed & they'll compost it, not eat it), shredded paper, shredded cardboard, wood chips, hay, straw, pine - shavings, sawdust & pellets (like what used in horse stalls). I haven't gotten wood chips/mulching material yet - working on that.

Both PDZ and DE have been found to decrease insect life - right there under the DLM and later in the compost and also in your garden - so I avoid both of those products. In different situations they can be helpful in regards to reducing smell and flies but not so much in DLM, compost or composting directly in your garden or "lasagna" gardening.

The trick is - not too many chickens at one time in too small of an area and layering. YES, if using just straw or just hay or even JUST LEAVES, it will pack together, mold, turn slimy (& leaves turn slick as "snot" and create a falling hazard for those of us older folks!) and gooey and again stink. It will compost down - but not easily. Think - "like a forest floor" and then (O, I see trees - multiple kinds - behind your fence!!) go walk in a forest. Look at what is on the floor of that forest. Even pick it up and shift through it. And gardeners WANT leaf mold, btw.

Mimic that - and you'll have it "made in the shade" no matter what the weather. Understand though - you may have to continually remove some as you add as you have a small area and you can't do it very deep since your pen fence sits right on the ground. Also understand that your chickens will scratch out quite a bit - if it's lightweight - it can/will blow around in your back yard. If you don't want a trashy looking backyard, your options are a lot more limited... Course you can just rake up the broken down, fly away parts and put it right back in your pen. Or you can line the inside or the outside of your pen to retain the debris you put in it. I used feed sacks and woven haystring on some of my pre-built pens. On ones I'm building now, I build them up with "logs" (last set of 3 pics) or tires (no pictures haven't started that one yet).

Our pen/coops aren't fancy, probably not pretty to most either. They do work. Our chickens currently seem happy, are healthy and almost all the pullets are now &/or have been laying like crazy! I'm hoping to set some more purebred eggs later this month set. Doing my first ever incubation right now.

Here is a pen that is approximately 8x8 (it was built before we purchased & I never seem to have the tape measure out there when I want to measure it). I did finally hoop it with CP last May & covered it with a tarp. It was knee deep in weeds when we put the 8 pullet & 4 cockerel - 55 Flowery Hen chicks in it. They were still small enough at the time to get through the 2x4" wire. The first pic is 2 days after they'd been put out in the pen. By mid-June, they had broken down most of the weeds. I added a couple of bags of leaves before the hurricane in September, but then added 8 more birds to the group. After the storm - it was wet, but it had drained well. Then we started removing what was in it and adding more basic debris. YES, I know - way too many birds in too small of an area. It would be November before I got the 8 Bielefelders moved to their own 2 smaller coop/pens - and then they free ranged, & cooped at night, from then until December 11th. I lost more than 10 birds (of 4 different breeds) that had been free ranging during the day while I was at work that day...


After the hurricane hit -






I currently have 8 pullets & 1 cockerel in that pen and they seem to be happy and healthy. They are content to stay in the pen now and have a tendency to freak out and do their darndest to get back into the pen if one follows me out the door/gate. I was trying to track how many bags of leaves & pine straw we put into the pen, but lost track. It's been quite a few...



If you are considering DLM on your new property, I recommend that you build up your run to contain 8-12" of debris. That's a great amount of debris to start with and allows it to break down nicely. It's amazing how fast they can break it down - even when you only have 4 chickens in an 8x8' or 10x10' "run". Of course if you don't have it covered over the top, might not matter that it's built up, but doing a base out of something solid or very fine HC, keeps your DLM in the run where you want it.



When all my 8x8 coops are done, I want to have no more than 6 hens & 1 rooster to a breeding group. Eventually every pen/coop will also have some way to get to a run or large paddock or even do some free ranging (when I'm home and working in that area - before evening) - taking some time, but getting there...

 

[paintedChix]

PhipN FarmGirl - please tell me how to bring crickets in (we do have them, but not many, LOL)...

I think we'll see a lot more insect life as we get more and various manures down in our sand. As we tractor chickens over areas and add other manures (duck, rabbit; composted dog/cat), spread pony manure with disk & harrow, we are bringing in red wriggler worms, too. But they don't do well in the arid sand areas - which is still a large majority of our property. Last year (2018) with the rain - a LOT of trees have come down - pulling right out of the ground as the over saturated sand doesn't hold the roots.

We are planing to plant nitrogen fixing shrubs in different areas of our pasture/paddocks that will serve as wildlife habitat for small critters and for chickens (a place to run from the hawks when free ranging), keep sandy areas from eroding away when we get the next hurricane or system that dumps 11" of water on us. Not automatically removing all the "stickery" black berry bushes as they come in naturally as I did when we first moved in (2015 & 2016 - o what I didn't know then!). Taking out some of the trees in our 11 acre areas of "forest" - but planting fruit, nitrogen fixing or nut trees in the place of the ones being removed. It's taking time - due to just being my non-outdoorsy hubby and me and $$ and time... The chickens help more than they realize, even with losing quite a few last year. Pigs will also help, but that's more than a little ways out yet...

 

[aart]

Both PDZ and DE have been found to decrease insect life

Have sees data on DE doing that, but can you cite PDZ data?

 

[paintedChix]

And here's pics of the hooped pen that has 8 pullets and 2 roosters in it. With leaves, pine straw and then mixed in several bags of shredded paper...

Have sees data on DE doing that, but can you cite PDZ data?

All I remember was seeing it here (sometime when I first joined in 2013/2014 - before we moved to this property) and I'd had problems with seeing it myself. I used PDZ for horse stalls and composted that horse manure, before I started using it w/ the chickens for a while.

I was very unhappy - when I compared areas that I used composted chicken litter w/ PDZ in it vs w/o PDZ in it. I don't think it was a scientific experiment though - was a few posts in one of the "poop board" threads I think. The handful of pics I had were on the computer that I lost all the photos that weren't already on line in google albums (didn't have a lot then - mostly of the ponies). I actually currently have several bags of PDZ and may be offering it for sale to local folks or to someone who needs it that can just come get it... Before the bags completely disintegrate. LOL.

Over long term, I don't know that either are really a problem. I know that you can compost with it in and your compost will come out fine and work but it does take longer. Just seemed when I used those two products extensively (I still use quite a bit of DE - it is the only thing that works WELL on the equine biting lice we inherited w/ this property. The one thing that makes me cry every spring when the eggs all hatch and I'm trying desperately to clean up/care for all the ponies. UGH), that things slow down A LOT and I just didn't see beneficial insects with either product in our manure(s). And piles just 10' away seemed to be fine and composted much faster w/ a lot more insect life.

More opinion, I believe, than science. And maybe COULD be different just like DLM can be. Should I change my comment in post above?

 

[paintedChix]

the pics I didn't add above...





Several loads of leaves/pine straw have been added since then, too. And it's due for more. I will try to get pics on Tuesday, when I have the morning off.

 

[aart]

Should I change my comment in post above?

Nah... unless you want to add wiggle words.....follow up posts cover it.

There are so many variables in composting, it's hard to say that any one thing will stop it dead.

 

[PhipN FarmGirl]

PhipN FarmGirl - please tell me how to bring crickets in (we do have them, but not many, LOL)...

I think we'll see a lot more insect life as we get more and various manures down in our sand.

Wow, you have worked really hard on that run! I think the crickets are just drawn to the sand, not sure why. After dark is when I find them, some are the big camel crickets too, easy to catch.