My poop pit experience...so far.

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.

 

Welllll...it went like this.

"Honey, I need you to build the poop pit with a pit that's 6 feet long and 2 feet wide, with two roosts made from 2x4s, m'kay?" What I got was 6' x 2' in the outer dimensions, but considerably smaller in the actual poopable area. I didn't DARE comment. So, I'm making it work. The roosts are too close together, I know, but the girls are managing. Heck, the Brahmas put their feet on one roost and their breasts on the other! It was obvious to me in two seconds that the "outside" poops on either side were going to miss the pit. Sigh.

So, every morning, I scoop the poops that are on the sand outside the pit, into the pit. It's not bad at all. Until I cleaned out the pit last weekend, the outside poop against the outer wall was falling between the pit and the wall. Niiiice. So, being the improviser that I am, I added the "poop chute", which is part of an old shower curtain, nailed to the wall, then into the inside ledge of the poop pit frame, thusly...



It's working MUCH better now. The poop chute is an evolution from the egg hammock, which became a necessity when Pip insisted on laying from the roosts...



Oh....PIP. (She's figured it out now, by the way, and lays pointy and WIDE eggs, poor girl.)

 

Quote:Not dumb at all! I sprinkle a fine layer of wood shavings along the bottom of the pit when it's empty. Then, on average, I put something on it every other morning: wood shavings, DE, Sweet PDZ. Usually wood shavings. Think a sprinkling of confectioners sugar, not a layer of icing. I'm still on my first bag of wood shavings.

Even in the two 90+ degree weeks we had this summer, there was no smell and very few flies. We HAVE had an extraordinarily wet 4 months, and there has been no problem. When I shoveled it all out, it was light and fluffy and didn't smell.

It takes me all of 5 minutes to scoop the coop in the morning, because most of the poop is already in the pit. As I understand it, it will be ready to go in the garden next spring, because it's already been breaking down over the winter. Sweet!