Another vote for clean but not "sanitized." We very much agree that immune systems are like muscles and should be exercised, so we are not anti-bacterial anything. The chickens get plenty of exposure to strange things when we let them run around the property (which is frequented by wild birds) to forage. But to see a stagnant mud puddle from winter melt in the run with piles of poop in it and the girls are trying to drink out of it? Um, that's a little ridiculous. Easily fixed with a big pile of straw...
I had big plans for having poop trays under the roost, even built a clean out door for them. We were spread too thin for me to finish details like that (and an automatic chicken door on the coop) before the snow.
So we just threw a bunch of pine shavings under the roosts (about four inches deep) and made it a point spot clean the coop every day. So a second vote for daily spot cleaning! It only takes 5-10 minutes (we have just five chickens, BTW).
We don't replace shavings either, we just add them as needed. We probably will do our first annual cleaning this spring. The roosts are close enough to the wall that the poops bounce off the wall sometimes on the way down. But I'll probably either move the roosts away from the wall if I can, or line the walls strategically with vinyl so they can just be quickly wiped down so that we don't even need to do a deep clean each year. After 8 months of use the urea stains on the wall next to the roost are the ONLY things that "need" cleaning.
I had big plans for having poop trays under the roost, even built a clean out door for them. We were spread too thin for me to finish details like that (and an automatic chicken door on the coop) before the snow.
So we just threw a bunch of pine shavings under the roosts (about four inches deep) and made it a point spot clean the coop every day. So a second vote for daily spot cleaning! It only takes 5-10 minutes (we have just five chickens, BTW).
We don't replace shavings either, we just add them as needed. We probably will do our first annual cleaning this spring. The roosts are close enough to the wall that the poops bounce off the wall sometimes on the way down. But I'll probably either move the roosts away from the wall if I can, or line the walls strategically with vinyl so they can just be quickly wiped down so that we don't even need to do a deep clean each year. After 8 months of use the urea stains on the wall next to the roost are the ONLY things that "need" cleaning.
