Sand in Modified Carport Coop

[Macy0402]

I am going to retire my current coop (too small and difficult to clean) and modify a carport into our next coop (obviously I will take all safety precautions into account in this design). There are 3 sections: storage, coop and run. I want to use sand in the coop section but am struggling because I would prefer to not place it directly on the ground. Even though it will be covered and the windows will not allow rain in, water will still be able get the sand wet from below. What flooring suggestions do you have to prevent the sand from sitting directly on the ground? A flat, easy to clean surface is a plus. Coop area is 5’ x 12’. We live in central NC so when it rains, it tends to settle on top of the ground due to the clay-type soil. I want to take precautions to reduce moisture in the coop and still allow it to be easily cleaned. I appreciate any insight!

 

[SourRoses]

I'm glad you are thinking about this.
Drainage is the #1 consideration when using sand. The reason sand is thought to (and does) dry stuff out (like poo), is that it offers moisture another avenue to travel (down) as well as the air exposure from the top. That can be fabulous for odor reduction when it's working.
But without good drainage from underneath, the sand will just log water because it doesn't release it well from the surface for evaporation like some other media.

I use and love sand, but it's sitting atop yet more, natural, sand. We get very heavy downpours and have flooded, but it's all drained away in 2 hours or less.

For non-sandy areas, the bedding sand should be based on surfaces such as the builders go-to outdoor solution of coarse gravel with landscape cloth, or well graded concrete.
I use landscape cloth with no problems around my chickens, and plenty of horse farms I've worked at use the gravel/cloth combo.

Sometimes instead of landscape cloth they will use a rubber mesh material engineered especially for the purpose. Because horses love to travel the fence lines, with weather it can get really run down and make muddy messes.
One farm I bought a horse from near Miami had resurfaced their entire place with gravel and the rubber mesh with sod on that. They were keeping a lot of horses on very small acreage so the paddocks saw heavy use, but they stayed incredibly green, and you couldn't find a patch of dirt for the horses to soil themselves in.

There are options, but if you want to keep it simple the chunky wood chips method is frequently recommended here.

 

[3KillerBs]

We live in central NC so when it rains, it tends to settle on top of the ground due to the clay-type soil.

Welcome to BYC! from Moore County.

If you have poor drainage then sand will not work for you because the sand system relies on things being absolutely dry.

If water pools in your coop/run area when it rains then the critical thing to do with any management system is to first address the drainage problem -- creating diversion ditches or grass swales to move the water around the coop/run being the most likely solution for soil that doesn't allow water to soak in to reach a French Drain.

Coarse wood chips, the sort you get from a tree-trimming service, are usually considered the gold standard for the control of mud and odor.

IMO, a deep litter system -- where the bedding and poop are actively composting -- is the easiest possible cleaning because you only have to add new litter at intervals and remove compost when you want it for your garden.

 

[gtaus]

if you want to keep it simple the chunky wood chips method is frequently recommended here.

Coarse wood chips, the sort you get from a tree-trimming service, are usually considered the gold standard for the control of mud and odor.

IMO, a deep litter system -- where the bedding and poop are actively composting -- is the easiest possible cleaning because you only have to add new litter at intervals and remove compost when you want it for your garden.

I live on a lake and have all the free sand in the world. I don't use sand for my coop or run.

Years ago, I used sand in my coop. But it needs to be cleaned out constantly, and yet it still seems to smell. I was forever replacing smelly sand with fresh sand. It was a lot of work.

For the past 3+ years, when I got back into having chickens, I have been using the deep bedding system in the coop using wood chips, paper shreds, leaves, and just about anything else organic that I can get for free. My favorite for the coop is now paper shreds as deep bedding, but I had great results with free wood chips, too. I now only replace the coop deep bedding twice a year, and, frankly, I could easily stretch that out to once a year or even longer.

All my old coop bedding gets tossed out into the chicken run for composting. I harvest hundreds of dollars' worth of compost every summer for my gardens. It's really a nice setup and I encourage anyone with chickens and gardens to consider making the chicken run into a composting system. The chickens love to scratch and peck in the compost looking for bugs and worms to eat. That helps break down everything into useable compost even faster.

 

[Heidirg]

I love the idea of turning the run into a composting area.. my chickens have a run but we leave the door open and they have access to our backyard. Throwing all my coops cleanings/pine shavings might be silly then since they don’t spend much time in the run except when they get food and water and come in to bed. Hmmm

This might seem like a silly question but don’t you need water for composting to work? IF I attempted to turn an area into a chicken composting area, would I need to spray it down ever or…?

 

[3KillerBs]

I love the idea of turning the run into a composting area.. my chickens have a run but we leave the door open and they have access to our backyard. Throwing all my coops cleanings/pine shavings might be silly then since they don’t spend much time in the run except when they get food and water and come in to bed. Hmmm

This might seem like a silly question but don’t you need water for composting to work? IF I attempted to turn an area into a chicken composting area, would I need to spray it down ever or…?

Actually, it's not a silly question.

An open-topped run exposed to the weather will get all it's water naturally unless you live in a quite dry climate. A closed run might indeed need some extra water -- you could dump out the waterers inside the run when changing the water.

I am actually having that problem with the deep litter in my big, open air coop -- it's remarkably dry in there even after a wet winter so my composting-in-place isn't actually composting.

 

[gtaus]

Throwing all my coops cleanings/pine shavings might be silly then since they don’t spend much time in the run except when they get food and water and come in to bed. Hmmm

If you want to make compost, then I would suggest tossing all the old coop litter into the chicken run. Even if your chickens don't spend much time in the run, nature will eventually break down all that organic matter into compost. To me, that's much better than bagging up the old litter and tossing it in the garbage.

This might seem like a silly question but don’t you need water for composting to work? IF I attempted to turn an area into a chicken composting area, would I need to spray it down ever or…?

Yes, composting needs water to start the process. My chicken run is open to the weather, so our natural rain is all I need to make good compost. If you have a covered run or live in a dry climate, you will probably have to spray the litter down with water every once in a while. The goal is to have the composting litter at a wrung-out sponge stage.

I find one of the great benefits to having converted my chicken run into a chicken run composting system is that all my litter in the run attracts lots of bugs and worms that my chickens love to eat. The compost litter is a living system, full of good stuff that the chickens love. They are scratching and pecking into the litter outside all day. My commercial feed bill gets cut in half in our non-snow months when the chickens are outside digging into the litter and finding all kinds of tasty things to eat.

 

[gtaus]

I am actually having that problem with the deep litter in my big, open air coop -- it's remarkably dry in there even after a wet winter so my composting-in-place isn't actually composting.

My chicken run compost system is open to the weather, and with normal rainfall, everything stays moist enough for composting where I live. The top few inches are dry but dig down a few inches and I have a composting system that is in that goldilocks' zone of a wrung-out sponge. My chicken run litter is typically 12-18 inches deep, depending on the season, so there is a lot of composting going on under the top 2 inches of dry covering.

We had a terrible drought summer a few years ago. There was basically no rainfall from April thought September. It was really bad. Most of my gardens dried up and died. That was the only time I have ever had to add water to my chicken run composting system. About once a week, I would set the lawn sprinkler to water down the chicken run for maybe 30 minutes at a time. That was about enough to keep everything moist.

It's not just composting that I was concerned about. I was also concerned that if the litter got too dry, then all the beneficial bugs and worms would either die or move on to a better environment. Having 12-18 inches of litter in the chicken run was a big benefit to me because it stored a lot of water under the dry top few inches of litter. I think that if I only had a few inches of litter in the run, it would have dried out every day, which would slow down or stop the composting process, and would not have been a good environment for all the bugs and worms that live in my chicken run compost.

My chicken coop and run is in my backyard, so I was able to string out a garden hose and sprinkler from the house to wet down the run that drought summer. I monitored the condition of the litter and made sure I kept it at that wrung-out sponge zone. No problems for me and the chickens ate fresh bugs and worms all summer while everything else in the yard was burning up and dying.

That drought year was the only time I have ever had to add water to my system to keep it moist and composting. I suppose if you live in dry climate, or if you have a covered run, that would have to be factored into your consideration.