Before the rock was added, it was just hard packed dirt with sand thrown in on top. The sand worked great for cleaning, but with all the rain we got it all turned to a thick sludge. I'm doing a lot of thinking, trying to "start over" with the entire base part of things. We're putting a larger, fully enclosed run over their coop so they have more room. We have 6 girls (3 leghorns and 3 white rock) and they have gotten so big that they constantly run in to one another. We are tearing down a playset and I plan to use some of the wood from that to raise their coop off the ground. Then I'm thinking of just using the pine shavings on their floor.
Thoughts?
Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge.
I love your coop! It is the cutest thing ever!!! It's absolutely adorable including the upgraded roof and the KFC sign! I can tell you care about your chickens.
However, as you've figured out, your coop/run is way too small for 6 chickens. Almost every pre-fab manufacturer out there takes advantage of the fact that new chicken owners don't have a sense for how big chickens get and how much space they really need to be healthy and happy in a backyard setting. Manufacturers use the commercial chicken raising space recommendations to sell their coops, but those only work well under commercial conditions (debeaked birds in small square wire cages that never go outside their cages, or in commercial chicken houses). If you have bantam chickens, the prefab cages are a better fit, but even then you have to be mindful not to take them at their word for how many chickens the coop will hold.
Recommendations on this site, which I've found to be accurate, are a minimum of 4 square feet floor space in the coop, 1 square foot roost length in the coop, and 10 square feet minimum of floor space in the run for standard large fowl chickens, which is what you have. You take the floor space, subtract out any space taken up by feeders, waterers, nesting boxes, etc, and then you have the total available floor space for the chickens. Perches help, but not as much as you'd think when chickens are figuring out how much space they need and how much they need to fight to get it.
I live in North Alabama USA where I get maybe 3 days of winter, so I don't actually have a traditional coop, I have a 200 sq ft totally covered run, and put my perches and everything in there. (We also don't free range at all due to predators, so they stay in there year round). My girls get 15 sq ft per chicken. For a while we had 10 sq ft per chicken, and I still haven't totally fixed the feather picking and bullying that arose from them not having enough space. I had to rehome and remove several chickens before they had enough room, but the difference was obvious once I'd done so. They were so much calmer once they had enough space, with much less pecking/fighting/dominance issues. In my climate, the birds need 3 square feet minimum of open ventilation above their heads per chicken, which meant I basically had to remove the top 1/3 of my shed (prospective coop) walls, so I just stuck with the open air covered run concept (Woods Coop sort of) and rehomed some chickens so they had enough floor space.
So I guess I'm encouraging you to continue with your coop expansion plans - it's good that you're doing that. I'm hoping these guidelines will help you make your expansion big enough that you can finally get some awesome peace in your flock.
And pine shavings on the floor inside the coop is a common choice, and quite effective if you make them deep enough and they don't get wet. You want enough shavings to dry out the poop quickly, and you've got to keep them dry to avoid mold and nastiness.
Have you looked into poop boards for inside your coop? You can put Sweet PDZ stall refresher (zeolite crumbles) on the boards and just scoop the poop every other day, and it keeps your coop less smelly, drier, and you use a lot less pine shavings as bedding. If you design the coop with enough space, this has been a good solution for many folks. The scooped poop gets added to your compost pile as a high nitrogen amendment, and the zeolite is fine to compost also.
