Prepping deep litter for fall

[rosemarythyme]

Hoping this helps any folks who are new/newer to deep litter and wonder about when/how cleanouts would be done.

We get a lot of rain in fall and spring. Summers are fairly dry (which makes sifting out broken down deep litter fairly easy), so end of summer is the optimal time for me to scrape out old deep litter (about 3 years worth of accumulation at this point) to drop down the level of litter a bit before new chips get added for drainage. With the forecast calling for a week of rain on the horizon I have to work double time to get this done. Still not completely finished (I snapped photos halfway through) but I'm on track to finish before the rains come.

I scraped up and sifted the deep litter through hardware cloth into buckets. Big pieces of debris got tossed back into the run. The "dirt" (broken down leaves, grass, wood particles, hemp, chicken poop) went into a 1 cubic yard sized bag, and will be a nice addition to to my garden beds next year. I had anticipated removing about 1/2 cubic yard of dirt but managed to harvest 1 full cubic yard.


Once the extra dirt was removed, I added new chips. This chip pile contains a mix of fir, hemlock, cherry, Western cedar, willow from our lot. Since the pile is still relatively fresh, about 2 months old, to be safe I'm strictly using chips from the surface layer.


One side of the run done, with about 1-2" of new chips:


Done side on left vs in-progress on right:


Once chips are down to provide drainage I can add dried leaves again. I bag excess leaves for use in the run and in composting throughout the year. I still have a few leftover bags of dried leaves in the greenhouse from last year. Soon the entire greenhouse will be filled with new bags.

 

[Debbie292d]

We are horse pellet peeps, but I heard this deep litter bedding can keep coops a bit warmer in the winter? We heat, so it doesn't matter, but so many up here in the frozen tundra have chickens and don't heat, and wind up with frostbitten or even dead chickens. I had wanted to learn more about it to convince them to at least do this for their chickens if it helps keep them from freezing. This was a great explanation I'll save to pass on.

 

[rosemarythyme]

We are horse pellet peeps, but I heard this deep litter bedding can keep coops a bit warmer in the winter?

I don't use it in the coop, only the run - my coop needs to stay dry so no composting can go on inside. Main reason for deep litter in the run is to provide drainage to prevent mud issues (which I used to have), with a side effect of producing composted dirt for the garden.

 

[Debbie292d]

I don't use it in the coop, only the run - my coop needs to stay dry so no composting can go on inside. Main reason for deep litter in the run is to provide drainage to prevent mud issues (which I used to have), with a side effect of producing composted dirt for the garden.

Ahh, okay. I had heard of people doing that in coops and wondered about the humidity too. That's probably a bad idea then for up here. But at least I sure learned a lot. Thank you!

 

[breegull]

We are horse pellet peeps, but I heard this deep litter bedding can keep coops a bit warmer in the winter? We heat, so it doesn't matter, but so many up here in the frozen tundra have chickens and don't heat, and wind up with frostbitten or even dead chickens. I had wanted to learn more about it to convince them to at least do this for their chickens if it helps keep them from freezing. This was a great explanation I'll save to pass on.

Frostbite is more of a moisture problem than a temperature problem. Those folks most likely don't have enough ventilation in their coops to deal with all the moisture from the chickens' breath and poops. Even in the northern parts of Alaska, Canada, Nordic countries, etc., chickens do just fine in unheated, open-front coops. They just need to be draft free, well-ventilated, and dry. (A search for "Woods Coop" will show you lots of cool examples if you're curious.)

BYCers often make a distinction between Deep LlTTER (in the run, as described in this post) and Deep BEDDING (in a dry coop, like what you are talking about). Deep bedding is usually done with pine shavings and/or straw or hemp. If you do a search for "deep bedding" you can find lots of great articles and posts about it that would be good to share.

 

[rosemarythyme]

Maybe I should turn this into an article, but for now, an update...

So I did finish getting dirt out, chips in, before the rains came. After that it rained on and off from Sunday through Thursday, going by the creek and a bucket I had sitting out we got maybe 4" total? It gave me a good opportunity to check if the chips I laid down were sufficient or not.

For the most part yes, the run held up well, only puddling around the base of the coop (since the chickens excavate around it ) and a bit around the two terracotta cubbies and by the lower gate itself. So I put in another cart load of chips this morning in that general area and elevated the cubbies a bit, and I think that'll take care of drainage for this season.

The run was 100% surface dry today and has remained firm to walk on.