What is the best bedding material for chicks? (Cheap and easy)

[BlacksheepCardigans]

We use - and love - the pine pellets like are used in pellet stoves. They're also used as bedding for horses. You need to get the softwood kind, not the hardwood, but they work great and they're drier than either shavings or sawdust. When they get wet they expand and dry out to sawdust, which means you get (basically) two lives out of the bedding. The initial wetting (from waterers or similar) or pooping gets them to sawdust and then they can take another wetting before they need to be changed.

 

[burmarosa]

I go to the local sawmill and purchase the pine shavings for $8 a condensed bale. They sell them in 3 sizes of flakes: large, medium and small. I get the small flakes and one half bale covers my 6 x 10 coop floor about 3" deep. I use a kitty litter scoop and scoop out the poop daily. The shavings fall through the slits in the scoop.
Every couple of months I sweep (linoleum floor) out the entire contents, throw down some DE and add fresh shavings. I used to put hay on top of that but had one hen with impacted crop and read where eating long pieces of dried grass can cause impaction so stopped with the hay. Today I assisted a necropsy on one of my hens that died from a large blockage of rotten egg. Must have been in there a while because it looked like cooked eggs and smelled awful. In her gizzard was some material that looked like shavings. I don't know if all of my hens eat the shavings or if she was eating it because she was stressed. Now considering going back to throwing hay on top of the shavings. Has anyone observed their birds eating the pine shavings? Thanks

 

[rizwan]

The best material for the chicks in bedding is bed linen. You know why because it keep warm. cheap bedding will be more suitable for chicks. that's my prefer now it's depend to you what kind of material you like for them.

 

[A.T. Hagan]

I use kiln-dried pine shavings such as the local feed stores sell for horse stall. For just sixteen chicks one bale is all you'd probably use.

I've never put paper toweling down on top of the shavings and don't see any need to. I've brooded hundreds of chicks just by putting them directly onto the shavings. In face I've got fifty White Leghorn chicks in the brooder right now.

For the volume you get they are cheap, absorbent, easy to work with, and smell nice when you first put them in. Mix with manure, spilled feed, feather/down they make a great soil amendment.

 

[gokan68]

I am using pine shavings too, easy to use, the bale I have for my 3 chicks will last a while. Also throwing the used shavings into my garden and will be tilling them in soon.

~gokan68

 

[secuono]

Cheap & easy...lets see...
Paper towels the first week or two. After that, bare bottom. Just sweep up the little dried poops that are mixed with all the feed they spilled and your done. =p

 

[terwelpbantams]

i am using straw currently, i used paper towels at the start of this year but three of my silkie chicks got sprawled leg. but im considering switching to wire so they cant get in their droppings. Is this a good idea?

 

[Bare bottom farm]

I use shreded paper... Old bills are free,lol

 

[stickers]

I agree on the wood pellets. They dont get into the waterer and feeder like shavings do. I also use paper towels over the pellets the first few days. You can just roll the paper up, and toss in trash. I find its much less messy than shavings.

 

[Kaneke]

someone tell me why I shouldn't be doing what I am doing -- certainly it's cheap and easy

our yard has a lot of weedy wide bladed grass -- Johnson grass or something like that -- coming up through the wedelia groundcover

we don't use any fertilizer or any chemicals on our yard and neither do the neighbors

there's also some Spanish Needle growing in between, which the local chickens just love to eat

so I went out and grabbed hands full of the new grass that has grown since I last pulled weeds (three weeks ago)

every time I noticed the brooder bedding was looking a bit poopy, I went out and gathered more grass (we have half an acre ... ); about every couple of hours but if I'd used more, I wouldn't have had to do it so often (or if my brooder was larger, or I had less than ten chicks)

put down a skim of food grade DE, then loaded in the 4 inch or so, lengths of grass

chicks just LOVE it, they have the time of their lives digging through it and pecking (some of the grass has seed tassels on)

I put in a length of curtain rod, diagonally through the cardboard box, and within a day they were roosting on that much of the time; keeps the poo more or less in a line underneath, easier to cover it up

we just moved the chicks to a somewhat larger cardboard box, and I noticed that even packed-down, the grass was about four inches deep ... I put a fresh layer in about three inches deep in the new brooder and will keep on doing what I'm doing ..

these chicks were hatched "in the wild", so to speak, at a friend's place, and ran loose for several days with mama, before the friend trapped them and got them to me (I am really only chicken-sitting for my neighbor until she gets her coop set up for them)

so I get the fun of watching them and "taming" them --- the hen is free ranging outside; had they stayed with her, they would have grown up as wild as she is

pix when DH figures out how to upload from camera to computer