Oh, and I forgot to share my fly solution!
We had HORRIBLE flies. Like a plague. We had them last year too (without chickens) but this year they were 10X worse. They were so thick on the grass in our backyard that all of the shady spots looked black. Seriously disgusting. And I live in a nice non-agricultural HOA neighborhood. Our entire backyard is grass except for our garden, and the chicken run is our side-yard. There are no piles of poop anywhere and everything is clean. But STILL the flies!
So I bought 3 Rescue hanging fly traps at Home Depot ($15 for 3) and a 50lb bag of food-grade DE at Higley Feed ($24). I hung up the 3 "meat bags" as we like to call them... one in the chicken run, one near our patio where the flies were the worst, and one near the back fence in the grass. Then I sprinkled DE liberally throughout the coop, run, and all of the shady parts of our grass where the flies were the thickest. I used maybe 1/10th of the bag, and I'll reapply as needed.
5 days later the improvement is so huge that I can barely believe it. All of our "meat bags" have 2-3 INCHES of dead flies floating in them.
All of the DE-sprinkled areas, even the ones nowhere near a "meat-bag" have a tiny fraction of the original amount of flies in them... maybe 10%. At most.
All in all-- a HUGE success! All for the low low price of $39 (and the necessity of smelling the meat-bag odor when the wind shifts...those things are coming down asap, but they work great!)
We had HORRIBLE flies. Like a plague. We had them last year too (without chickens) but this year they were 10X worse. They were so thick on the grass in our backyard that all of the shady spots looked black. Seriously disgusting. And I live in a nice non-agricultural HOA neighborhood. Our entire backyard is grass except for our garden, and the chicken run is our side-yard. There are no piles of poop anywhere and everything is clean. But STILL the flies!
So I bought 3 Rescue hanging fly traps at Home Depot ($15 for 3) and a 50lb bag of food-grade DE at Higley Feed ($24). I hung up the 3 "meat bags" as we like to call them... one in the chicken run, one near our patio where the flies were the worst, and one near the back fence in the grass. Then I sprinkled DE liberally throughout the coop, run, and all of the shady parts of our grass where the flies were the thickest. I used maybe 1/10th of the bag, and I'll reapply as needed.
5 days later the improvement is so huge that I can barely believe it. All of our "meat bags" have 2-3 INCHES of dead flies floating in them.
All in all-- a HUGE success! All for the low low price of $39 (and the necessity of smelling the meat-bag odor when the wind shifts...those things are coming down asap, but they work great!)
