Types of Sand for brooder.

[Zanylady89]

I plan on starting off with puppy pads initially, but then switching over to sand. I'm just a little unclear on the type and what it looks like. When I typed in river sand on Amazon I found three different types. A riverbed sand, for aquariums and small aquatic turtles.















I'm not sure how coarse or fine the sand should be. There's this coarse silica one.







And another



Which is best to use? And how much sand would I actually need? We're starting out with a small brooder and plan on expanding as they grow. How deep does the sand need to be? Is it possible to just get the dirt from my yard and use that?

 

[SchwartzLakeFarmNC]

We use construction or all purpose sand from your local hardware store, a couple of inches in the brooder is all you need, but I wouldn't use for the 1st week, we let them acclimate to paper towels or such so they understand what food looks like before putting on sand, but some start right out with sand, all up to your situation.

You can search here for sand options and you'll get 100 different opinions. I never use play sand unless it's my only option and I ONLY use it in my run when the girls are fully grown, a bag of sand will last you the entire time they are in the brooder, most bags are 50lbs.

Our chickens are on sand for the rest of their life after we move to the coop and run and found it to be very easy to work with, but your location and application will determine what is best for you, but I give sand an AA++ for my coop and run.

 

[Zanylady89]

We use construction or all purpose sand from your local hardware store, a couple of inches in the brooder is all you need, but I wouldn't use for the 1st week, we let them acclimate to paper towels or such so they understand what food looks like before putting on sand, but some start right out with sand, all up to your situation.

You can search here for sand options and you'll get 100 different opinions. I never use play sand unless it's my only option and I ONLY use it in my run when the girls are fully grown, a bag of sand will last you the entire time they are in the brooder, most bags are 50lbs.

Our chickens are on sand for the rest of their life after we move to the coop and run and found it to be very easy to work with, but your location and application will determine what is best for you, but I give sand an AA++ for my coop and run.

Thank you so much! Does sand fair well in rainy weather?

 

[SchwartzLakeFarmNC]

Yes, as long as there is enough drainage to let the sand dry out. Our run is covered so we only get driving rain into the run, and we keep 6 inches deep in our run, so a good rake and we turn over the sand each night so it does dry very quickly and no smell at all with our setup. I do add Lime to our sand, and DE from time to time, and only add a bag or 2 every so often, but we screen out the big poops weekly so really no need to change out unless it gets so bad, which hasn't happened to ours yet.

We've used sand in both of our runs on 2 different properties, with no issues at all, our chickens love the "beach" and in my opinion, they are the cleanest when we switched to sand.