Anyone want to trade tips or tricks they use to make chicken care easier?

how smart is that. is poultry dust the same as de? here in Texas the weather is so variable & my coop is constructed w/heat in mind. i'm using old curtains and drop cloths strung over wire (like clothes line) it is inside a hoop house, so the "curtains" don't get wet. i can adjust their coop to the variable weather (today is 43 & mon is supposed to be 83) just by pulling the "curtains" back & forth. my chickens are chicks (5 wks) so they're a little susceptible.

 

I have to say....authomatic waterers CHANGED MY LIFE!!!

No more messing around with waterers and making sure they're full/not dirty....no more need to scrub with a toilet bowl brush and bleach...no more filling up waterers in August in the 95F+ heat of Florida!

Now - all I have to do is give the a swoosh once a day to remove debris....and I'm DONE!

LOVE it!

 

My suggestion, give them as much room as you can stand. I find the more room I give them, the more flexibility I have to deal with problems and the less hard I have to work.

 

I use sand instead of wood shavings in the coop. That way I can scoop it out with a reptile scooper daily (u don't have to do this daily) I just find that 10-15 minutes a day keeps my coops nice and clean and also I only have the poop to compost and not all those shavings all the time. Less waste to dispose of and much cleaner coops. I do still use shavings in the nest boxes.

 

Here's the innovation I'm most proud of that saves several pounds of feed from going to waste on the ground every week. It's a feed catcher I sewed out of naugahyde. It fastens with an elastic band and a quick-release belt fastener you can get in the camping and hiking supply section at Wal-Mart. The catcher is made rigid by a heavy gauge wire threaded into the seam, gathered just slightly to form a bowl. Once or twice a day, I unfasten it and dump the feed the chickens have "beaked" out back into the feeder. Not a drop gets wasted. It goes off and on in just seconds,

By the way, the turtle neck sweater was crocheted by my neighbor at my specifications to protect my Buff-Brahma Joyce's bald neck until the feathers would grow back in.

 

Where do you get your sand? A garden center? I'm toying with the idea of sand in my coops, and pea gravel surrounding them.