Hay or straw in run or neither for winter?

[Navahogirl]

I have a multipurpose sand in the run right now and it works out pretty well but I'm wondering if I should put hay or straw in the run for the winter months any ideas or suggestions?

 

[RainbowHen]

In the past I found that hay molds quickly and turns into a wet, stinky mat. If I had to choose between the two I would use straw, though leaves and wood chips work buch better.

 

[DaisyG2317]

Wood chips are great as well. If you have the time to wait and the space available you can get a whole truckload for free on chipdrop.

 

[Mother-Hen-Michele]

in my area I gather up fallen leaves and put them in, they don't absorb water or poo, so it is dryer. They love to tear them apart looking for what is underneath so it becomes a nice mulch.

 

[LaFleche]

A nice load of bark mulch will keep them busy and the run dry.

 

[3KillerBs]

How about a big pile of fall leaves?

IMO, a mix of materials is better than all one thing because it better resists packing and matting.

 

[HortonCreek]

NY here as well and we live in very wet area so free wood chips are our best friend. We tried hay originally and it did get extremely nasty and I thought "Eh just keep piling it on!" What a mess to clean in spring. That being said, our new girls saw snow for the first time the other day and they were NOT thrilled to walk in it. I figure we'll be putting down some hay once the temps get brutally cold and the ground gets perpetually snow covered to at least give them a little relief for their feet - just not as heavily as in the past.

 

[paintedChix]

You are in an area that should be perfect for DLM. I use a lot of different sized materials in the DLM (Deep Litter Method) - hay, straw, weeds, leaves, small branches and limbs, small/softer pine cones & pine cones run over by mower, veggies, veggie peels, fruit & fruit peels, left over food that isn't moldy, shavings, wood mulch and spent garden leavings. I shred bills, paper & cardboard to add to our DLM as well. I've even used "trash" before shredding or composting when we got a storm that I didn't have enough material in - rather than it turning ankle deep in sucking mud, I dumped that as well as the leaves already in it. The chickens spread it out and shred it up, mixing it into the rest.

DLM

BeeKissed - video of DLM

There are many, many posts about DLM including the original and REALLY LONG and DEEP original thread.

I personally HATE sand. It is where I live (sandhills of NC), but it's been used and abused for many many years. After a rain storm, the dogs & cats will go out and dig and roll in it and they smell up the whole house. The sand doesn't drain all the feces out (any animal - and this 20 acres has had both wildlife and livestock on it over the last 30 years or so), so after the wet (rain, sleet, ice, snow) - it smells bad enough in areas where we have straight sand - that it will bowl you over and your eyes/nose will run, too. Not ammonia, though you can get that in coops & horse barns. Amazing to me to walk into such places here in NC and have it so awful, when in the west, barns were less closed, different methods used and no ammonia stink.

We are actually using the chickens to change our natural sand into good, plant supporting soils. We do that in two ways - using the DLM in the coops/runs/pens (after it builds up you can remove as much as you want - as long as you leave some to "restart" your DLM process) & runs and also running chicken tractors. Currently our smaller tractors usually get moved every few days. Larger ones or with more chickens would need to be moved at least 1x or even 2x daily. Their scratching and manuring builds the soil and the bio-dynamic "webs" of life living in it. I've also done a free range model in electric poultry net - but that didn't protect my flock from hunting dogs that jumped the fencing and decimated them. Currently almost all of our chickens are kept in some type of enclosure - except for the current free rangers - down to 3 hens and a roo. They are bantam mixes that originated from the first mix of 15 bantams given to me in December 2011. The numbers go up and down actually - chicks hatched naturally get grown out until they start roosting in our carport, then they get separated. Boys generally go into freezer and currently have 4 girls that just started laying.

A lot of my pictures in the last 18 months haven't been cropped/resized as Google Albums quit allowing me to load them. I will need to figure out if I accidentally changed a setting that makes the Album program dislike my photos - for every 1 it will load, 10 will not. Plus, I've got a lot of photos...

 

[Xouie]

Near coastal California here, so we don’t get much winter. But for the wet “cold“ season we use alfalfa hay everywhere. They eat it and play in it.

 

[MIgardengal]

We get over 300 inches of snow where I live in Michigan. So lots of spring mud! Best bet is wood chips (not the kind you buy in a bag!) like from stump grinding or when they trim a tree down.

I also toss all kinds of stuff in my run, in summer, grass clippings. In autumn leaves/pine needles. And a few buckets of wood chips now and then. The poo filters to the bottom, so it keeps it smelling fresh, and keeps the flies down.