whats the best bedding for you and why.

[bluefeather2697]

im a newbie to chicken raising, and i use very fine wood shavings for their bedding, is it good? what can u recommend? i heard of sand but i think chickens will hate it.

 

[bluefeather2697]

 

[bantamboy93]

Bedding? As in for the nest boxes? or for the floor of the coop for them to walk on? I use pine straw or hay for the nest boxes. Works fine. Easy to pull out and replace if they mess in it too bad. For the floor, I buy a couple big bales of pine shavings from the feed store and pour it out.. I rake it out most of the way and they do the rest of the work scratching.

 

[bluefeather2697]

Quote:
nope, im the one that they walk on, i used big chunks of wood shavings but it turned out muddy and smelly in a coop in just 1 week (im lazy to clean, haha

)
so now i use the fine ones and it works much better, since then, most of my chickens are inside the coop scratching and dust-bathing with the shavings.

 

[ruffles]

For my chicken coop, plywood floor, I stapled plastic to keep floor dry, as well as the nesting boxes. Then, I use shavings and straw like now for the winter.

For theother chickens I have very long home made rabbit hutches, about 9 feet long and four feet wide, stgrong screening in the middle, on either side the base is wooden, once again, I cover the wood with plastic
and add shavings and straw in the winter. On very cold nights I put straw on the heavy duty screening, as some of the chickens prefer not to huddle, so, they have warmth, and circulation.

 

[Snack Giver]

Just don't use CEDAR. It's bad for them. I learned that here.

 

[Alethea]

Straw works well for us and the chickens like it. We use it for both the floor and the nest box. We change it out monthly. The chickens love when we do that; they come in and rearrange it to their liking.

 

[Ole rooster]

Why not do a search and read about a week. Maybe that question already has an answer.

 

[TheSpiceGirls]

Sand!

Now I'm in CA and while it gets down to 30 many nights, it doesn't go much lower. And I also have a small coop with just a few birds.

Each morning when I go out to say hello, I take my kitty litter scoop and quickly scoop up all the droppings as well as some of the bigger ones in their run and toss it all into the compost bin. So I don't have to spend time cleaning out the coop on the weekends. Just scrub the waterer and refill the feeder.

Shavings took too long to break down in the compost and it was one more thing I had to constantly lug home from the feed store.

But I can see how if you lived where it got really cold that you'd want to do the deep liter method to keep the house a bit warmer for the girls at night.

 

[iBoodle]

In the coop they have wood shavings, in the run they have dirt/gravel. Occasionally I steal some sand from my siblings huge sandbox and throw it in there also.

I use a "pooper scooper" and scoop the poop (obviously...) from the wood shavings, and then throw a few more handfuls of the shavings in and they are good to go. Especially when the poop freezes (like right now!), it is super easy to clean!