Chicken Poop! Wow, I am not sure there isn't one post that doesn't mention chicken poop. It seems that a lot of posters avoid going into the coop unless they have to because of poop.
-How do you deal with feeding and watering? Don't you have to go in every day?
-If you feed and water in the run do you also need to do it in the coop? Which place is best?
-How does poop control relate to the deep litter method?
I am planning on using the deep litter method. Linoleum floors and washable walls. I plane to wheelbarrow everything out a couple of times a year (?) and hose it down. But what is the ongoing maintenance.
We don't have coop shoes. We have a scrub brush that we keep to brush off the chicken poop. If they are really "wet and fresh" we leave those shoes outside at the back door and clean them later. However, I will note that we don't walk into their current coop since it is a small coop with a back hatch that opens for cleaning and egg collecting. We use a modified deep litter method in their coop and clean it out about once a month. We are in the process of building a larger walk-in coop (8x12) that will be deep litter and we plan to rake it every few days as others recommend. Again, we will be using the brush for shoe poop cleaning. Chicken poop is just part of raising chickens. They are poop-machines!
They don't like their water in their coop and make a terrible mess of it, so we keep it outside and just add warm water in the morning if it is cold. The food we keep outside too. We haven't decided what to do in the new coop.
The other thing that seems to come up is a "chicken prison", maybe I'll call it the hospital ward.
What do you use for that?
I am planning to use a large dog kennel to house my chicks when they arrive, could that then become a hospital room?
As for the sick chickens, we use the large dog kennel carrier. We used the large dog kennel carrier for our first batch of chicks. The dog kennel works great as long as you don't have too many chicks.
