Official BYC Poll: How Do You Get Rid of Dirty Coop Bedding?

[Shadrach]

I'm not suggesting this will happen to everyone who scrapes bedding into the run, but this is what happened where I now look after the chickens.
The holes you can see are rat runs. The paper and poop has formed layers, beneath which is all sorts of stuff. I'll be digging it out in the future.
The rat runs go right underneath the coop and exit at the back.

 

[Quatie]

I do a bit with mine. If it still fairly clean I use it in my ducks runs and around their pools to keep the mud down and keep me from slipping. I also use the cleaner bedding on walking paths. I compost it and use it in the garden. The big thing I have been doing lately is using it as mulch in areas to keep the weeds down. I also use it as mulch in planters to reduce water usage.

 

[Wildgrass]

I'm in northern Colorado and use pine shavings, so my bedding is slow to break down. If we're going through a lot of green matter in the garden, I will add layers of used bedding in our compost piles. Otherwise, I take it out of the run and spread it out in the field by the run. Our soil is very dry and doesn't have a lot of organic matter, so I figure it can only help! The pine bedding takes about a year to break down here.

 

[MadGardener]

Small amounts of bedding get composted with poo.

My property has a deep cut ravine with lots of logs in it, I assume from when the plot was cleared. I've been filling it in with lumber and cut logs that are too rotten or small to be useful for much. The wild roses, grape vines, and briars from the woods get tossed in too. After brooding chicks, their bedding got dumped on top of the pile. It's stabilized the top some and I don't sweat that it's slower to break down.

 

[NorthwoodsChick]

What do you use on the coop floor? I have pine shavings and do the same with the garden - I even bury the bedding and mix it around with the soil to speed up its decomposition - but it’s never ready for spring planting I don’t use poop boards, so what I bury is shavings+poop, not just shavings, so the balance should be even better in terms of browns vs. greens, and there’s no identifiable poop left by springtime, but the shavings are still there… They seem to be gone only at the end of the growing season when I bury the next load.

similar climate, just starting off this year. I have two piles going, one more advanced as I primed it with decomposing stuff on my property so may be ready by Spring, the other by Fall 2023 or Spring 2024.
I use chipped pine in coop (dead wood) and run (green wood). I also start compose pile with punky wood and green wood chips open to the elements but in a homemade log (felled wood) crib.
I add greens from garden, yard, kitchen and chicken waste in layers. poops are scooped from boards and put in a bucket, emptied ever few days to compst pile. scratch tossed in to let chickens turn it.

 

[TooCheep]

I'm in northern Colorado and use pine shavings, so my bedding is slow to break down. If we're going through a lot of green matter in the garden, I will add layers of used bedding in our compost piles. Otherwise, I take it out of the run and spread it out in the field by the run. Our soil is very dry and doesn't have a lot of organic matter, so I figure it can only help! The pine bedding takes about a year to break down here.

Which is perfectly fine. Look around in nature- forests have organic litter of all types in all stages of breakdown and the plants are quite happy and healthy. Your soil does not have to look like it was poured out of a commercial bag of topsoil.

I throw my pine shaving coop bedding and straw nesting materials in the compost to mix with green scraps. Deep litter bedding from the run (leaves and chicken poo) gets thrown directly into the raised beds.

I also practice another form of long-term composting called "Back to Eden" in my mini-orchard. For the last 6-7 years, I've been putting primarily wood chips down in my mini-orchard. Each year, I'm now able to sift out some very nice organic soil for other uses. I just put 20 wheelbarrows full of wood chips/leaves/etc in that area this last week. As another benefit, the chickens love scratching around in there.

 

[StinkyAcres]

Composted for the gardens or scattered in the run depending on how soiled it is.

 

[Rangergord]

My litter is either mostly wood chips, sawdust and shavings or straw. If it’s mostly wood fibre I use it as mulch in my orchard and perennial plantings that are not constantly cultivated. With mostly straw litter I put it in my vegetable garden as mulch or tilled in.

 

[texsuze]

My chicken coop litter is pine shavings with chicken poop. I used to put coop poop/shavings in the muck cart, along with the shavings, horse manure, horse pee from mucking my horse stall every morning. All went into a manure spreader and was spread back and forth along my "arena trail" which starts about 70 yards from my barn.

Since my equine partner passed away in March, I still dump the coop litter into the muck cart, still dump it on the "arena trail", but I take it out by hand. The pine shavings take forever and ever to begin to break down. But made a wonderful exercise trot trail on the rare occasions when footing in the arena or other parts of the ranch were too wet to ride.

 

[Red Horse]

Inside the coop I placed 1x4's in front of the chicken door, the cleaning door, and the nesting boxes and then filled the coop floor with 2-3" of granular sweet pdz. Every day I scoop it with a telescoping cat litter scoop so I can reach all the way to the back. I like that it's so easy to clean and since it's not comfy to sleep in the girls prefer to sleep on their roosts (they are still only 7 weeks old and as of last week they still liked sleeping on the brooder floor instead of using the nice wide roosts I made in it).
I don't really feel comfortable using the poop in my compost because the pdz sticks to it so I just dump my little bucket way at the back of the property for now. I'm wondering if it would be ok to fertilize flower gardens or things you don't intend to eat.
In the run I have packed limestone screenings as the footing and I scatter a little straw over it. They love scratching in it and I feel like it helps absorb the extra smelly wet cecal poops so I rake it up every other day, compost it, and replace it with fresh.