Deep litter! Sand is a great insulator until it gets cold. My chickens would not set foot on a cold, sandy floor in the middle of winter. But toss some hay or straw right on the snow in the pen and they come out to play! The fluffy dry hay and straw makes a huge difference.
I also second deep litter in the pen. I have a huge pen, about 25'x40', and I use wood chips in my pen. I use fresh woodchips because these are readily available to me for free and they take longer to break down. I know there are some concerns with specific fungi breeding in fresh wood chips but I have never had a problem. I used to buy from a landscape company, $1 a yard plus $25 to deliver. Now I contact my local tree company that works for the city and they dump a truckload (about 12 yards) of chipped wood and some leaf litter and pine needles into my driveway for free, but I don't get to specify the amount. I have a party with grilling and invite over friends and people help me cart it to my chicken pen at the far end of my back lawn. I do this every couple of years. If you have somewhere to store a big pile of wood chips, you can order them this way and age them for a year on your own if you are concerned.
I try for about 6" deep across the whole pen and never touch it again except for in the spring when certain areas become impacted from all the snow and foot traffic and maybe the chips weren't deep enough anyhow. I just go out with a pitchfork and garden rake. I toss the compacted stuff around in the deep areas with the pitchfork and then rake the cleaner wood chips from those same areas into the compacted spots. When I have weeds pulled from my lawns or old veggie scraps, I just throw them right in. The rest of the year the chickens do the rest of the turning and digging for me. All around I spend 2-3 days of labor on my whole pen all year long.
If I feel like it, before I add new woodchips, I will sometimes use the ones that have been aging in chicken manure for a couple years in trenches when building new garden beds and shovel out the compost underneath for adding to those same raised beds. We have deep clay soil so double digging with the chicken manure wood chips is amazing.
The DL in the coop is similarly low maintenance. Depending on how many chickens I have I might clean it as many as four times in a year. I just toss it into a compost pile and it steams up for a month, then breaks down into clean compost over the course of a year. Nobody grows zucchini like I do. My biggest was 8lbs 10oz! Chicken compost is your gardens best friend. You can even just use it to mulch around trees or feed flower beds. Go nuts with it.
TL;DR: Always deep litter. Deep litter is AMAZING for both coops and pens.
I also second deep litter in the pen. I have a huge pen, about 25'x40', and I use wood chips in my pen. I use fresh woodchips because these are readily available to me for free and they take longer to break down. I know there are some concerns with specific fungi breeding in fresh wood chips but I have never had a problem. I used to buy from a landscape company, $1 a yard plus $25 to deliver. Now I contact my local tree company that works for the city and they dump a truckload (about 12 yards) of chipped wood and some leaf litter and pine needles into my driveway for free, but I don't get to specify the amount. I have a party with grilling and invite over friends and people help me cart it to my chicken pen at the far end of my back lawn. I do this every couple of years. If you have somewhere to store a big pile of wood chips, you can order them this way and age them for a year on your own if you are concerned.
I try for about 6" deep across the whole pen and never touch it again except for in the spring when certain areas become impacted from all the snow and foot traffic and maybe the chips weren't deep enough anyhow. I just go out with a pitchfork and garden rake. I toss the compacted stuff around in the deep areas with the pitchfork and then rake the cleaner wood chips from those same areas into the compacted spots. When I have weeds pulled from my lawns or old veggie scraps, I just throw them right in. The rest of the year the chickens do the rest of the turning and digging for me. All around I spend 2-3 days of labor on my whole pen all year long.
If I feel like it, before I add new woodchips, I will sometimes use the ones that have been aging in chicken manure for a couple years in trenches when building new garden beds and shovel out the compost underneath for adding to those same raised beds. We have deep clay soil so double digging with the chicken manure wood chips is amazing.
The DL in the coop is similarly low maintenance. Depending on how many chickens I have I might clean it as many as four times in a year. I just toss it into a compost pile and it steams up for a month, then breaks down into clean compost over the course of a year. Nobody grows zucchini like I do. My biggest was 8lbs 10oz! Chicken compost is your gardens best friend. You can even just use it to mulch around trees or feed flower beds. Go nuts with it.
TL;DR: Always deep litter. Deep litter is AMAZING for both coops and pens.
