Questions about : the Things You've Learned Thread

[luvmychicknkids]

I do deep litter. I have a plywood floor I covered with vinyl tiles. It has been about 6 months or so since it was all changed out. It is nice right now and I hate to change it but I probably will soon. I just stir things up with a rake every few days. It doesn't stink at all. One time it started smelling (have no clue why...weather maybe) but the next morning it smelled fresh again. I get a little poop on my shoes but not a lot and I have my special chicken shoes like many on here. Good luck, you will find what works well for you!!

 

[gritsar]

I have rubber coop boots. I'm in and out of the coop all day checking on food/water and collecting eggs. Not to mention taking the time to pet each girl and tell her goodnight at the end of the day. The boots are only worn in the coop and left at the back door when I come in the house.
I do what I call a modified deep litter method. Modified because of what my SO calls my OCCD - obsessive compulsive cleaning disorder. I turn the shavings about once or twice a week, adding a fine layer of DE when I do. Then I add a thin layer of shavings on top.
We do coop clean outs about every two months. I can't stand it to go any longer. My SO drives the tractor up to the coop door and I shovel it in the tractor bucket. He then carries it off to be dumped on the meadows. It helps the grass grow for hay. The man who leases our pastures for his cattle also dumps some of the shavings from his commercial houses on our meadows for the same reason.
I'm not worried about a little chicken poop. After all, I'm having a good day if I can walk to my mailbox without stepping in a great big ol' pile of cow...................poo.

 

[first time farmer]

I just wear my steal toe chippewas every where(yes even to HIGH SCHOOL! lol got made fun of at firs for being a hick. But it was ok because i am one lol) so i do not really care what gets on em. Mommy does though so i am not allowed to wear them in the house.

 

[vermontgal]

I do not have special coop shoes. But, I do have inside shoes and outside shoes.

Before I got chickens, I always wanted to be one of those people who takes off their shoes at the door. Guess what! Chicken poop helped me find the motivation to do what I had been trying to do for many years!

 

[mendogurl]

I am not terribly worried about poop, but I have certainly read so many posts here that refer to ways to avoid it, that I thought maybe this was a really big problem, and maybe I should start worrying, LOL.
I was planning on rubber boots, not too much else...

 

[warmfuzzies]

Here is what we do, it works for us!

Dirt floor. Add straw. poop. add more straw. poop add more straw....

etc etc etc untill time to spread it on the garden!

We add straw anytime it gets to yucky or smelly. It is never bad, you cant smell it even in the chicken house right now, and I need to add more straw. You can smell chicken, but not chisken poop.

 

[BarkerChickens]

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.​

 

[NancyDz]

The majority of the "pooping is done when they are sleeping on the roosts. You can keep your coop fairly clean by installing a poop board under the roosts. Search on this, there are many threads and ideas here. I have a board under my roost with plastic bins underneath that I remove and clean, the bins have shavings in them currently but I've used newspaper or
wood pellets too.. it definitely helps A LOT with keeping the coop cleaner.

I have rubber slip on shoes by my back door for my coop visits too.

Nancy

 

[Judy]

I keep thinking I will put in a poop board under the roosts, but it's so much easier to throw a few handfuls of hay over last night's piles. I wear those $7 vinyl clogs from the dollar store when I am outdoors, and leave them at the back door. But then I have always hated shoes and never wear them in the house anyway -- slippers, socks, barefoot, but never shoes. I use hay over a dirt floor in the coop. I fork it out every couple of months only because I want the compost; could no doubt let it build up much longer.