I have been an avid BYC lurker since before we got our first chicks this past April. Well, we're swimming in eggs now, of our original twelve have lost one to gender and one to a fox (well. both to foxes, really, but that makes the story longer), and I'm beginning to feel that I have some actual experience under my belt. I'm a bit nervous about our first winter, but I'll jump off that bridge when I come to it.
One of the things that appealed to me when we were conceptualising and building our coop was the idea of a poop pit. Ours looks like this:
Well. It looked like that before the chickens pooped all over it. Anyway. This thing is fantastic. Not only does it catch 90% of the night poop, but when I scoop up the poop from the rest of the coop (we have sand on our coop floor), it just goes right into the pit. No carrying it out to the compost pile. Ahhhhhh.....
The chicks went in the coop the third week of May, and last weekend we decided it was time to empty the poop pit for the first time. I was DREADING it. I mean, decaying chicken poop, five months old, together with some smashed eggs laid by Pip who insisted on laying from atop the roosts for a good few weeks? Mixed in with wood shavings and Sweet PDZ and DE? It had to be gross. And smelly. And HEAVY.
I'm here to report that it was none of those things. It was easy and light and not disgusting at all. It took, maybe, ten minutes, and I was being helped by an eight-year-old. I could have done it much faster alone. I am so sold. The fact that it might keep the girls a little warmer while the roost this winter is icing on the cake.
Thought I'd let y'all know.
One of the things that appealed to me when we were conceptualising and building our coop was the idea of a poop pit. Ours looks like this:

Well. It looked like that before the chickens pooped all over it. Anyway. This thing is fantastic. Not only does it catch 90% of the night poop, but when I scoop up the poop from the rest of the coop (we have sand on our coop floor), it just goes right into the pit. No carrying it out to the compost pile. Ahhhhhh.....
The chicks went in the coop the third week of May, and last weekend we decided it was time to empty the poop pit for the first time. I was DREADING it. I mean, decaying chicken poop, five months old, together with some smashed eggs laid by Pip who insisted on laying from atop the roosts for a good few weeks? Mixed in with wood shavings and Sweet PDZ and DE? It had to be gross. And smelly. And HEAVY.
I'm here to report that it was none of those things. It was easy and light and not disgusting at all. It took, maybe, ten minutes, and I was being helped by an eight-year-old. I could have done it much faster alone. I am so sold. The fact that it might keep the girls a little warmer while the roost this winter is icing on the cake.
Thought I'd let y'all know.