I've had chickens for 4 years now. I have 2 large runs that accommodate 24 chickens. Each run has well over 10sq ft per chicken. I use pine chips and straw for bedding. My coop is fine, it's the runs that I have questions about.
How often do you clean out your runs?
How much bedding do you use? How deep is the bedding (for non deep litter method)?
What do you do with the bedding when you clean out? (These runs are too big to use the bedding for compost. It would be too much.)
Basically, how do you maintain a clean and healthy run without breaking the bank with bedding?
Any suggestions would be appreciated.
How often: never. The point of deep litter is to let it compost and create new soil. If it is under roof, it probably needs occasional sprinkling to keep the composting going. To make the composting work, deep litter must be added on top of soil, not gravel* or a wooden floor, etc. The litter interacts with the native soil.
* I just saw where Ted built his on a mix of gravel and sand. This works for him, because he added 4-6" of soil on top of it, and then additional organic material (organic in the sense of once-living) on top of it, which then has been composting.
How much: Gosh, I guess since we built the 8'x15' run late last February, so eight months ago, I have probably added - over time - four 2 cu.ft. bags of hardwood mulch, 2 large bags of pine straw, a large bag of pine flakes (plus periodic gifts from the coop), 3-4 bags of pine and/or hardwood bark chips, several lawn mower bags of cut grass, and multiple bags of leaves chopped up by the lawn mower. It's been 2 months or so since adding anything except the leaves and grass clippings, and there's currently maybe a 2" layer of loose litter over new soil. The level of soil in the run has been raised 4-5" overall since we started from the composting process. Probably $50? in purchased materials added.
Cleaned-out bedding: I don't clean out, so this is moot. I do go in periodically with a garden fork and work up and turn over the soil, mixing loose litter in with it. (I am especially effective after reading too much news.) The chickens also do their part by scratching and digging, but unfortunately they do a lot more of this out in the yard than in the run. I'm letting this current 2" of remaining litter continue to rot down, and then I'll probably work it all up again and take 3" or so out to jump-start the spring garden beds, and then start adding stuff again. (I'll keep adding leaves through the winter though, mostly for the girls' entertainment, as they've stripped their foraging areas bare.)
Maintain: All the above! Essentially, I am trying to replicate a fairly fertile forest floor (wow, all those f's without cursing!), because this approximates part of the natural environment of the ancestors of modern chickens, along with multiple and varied perching options in their run. I find that the more closely we can imitate their ancestral "real world", the healthier and happier they are.
