Coop Management
In addition to the chicken making mulch cycle, I have a coop bedding strategy that works really well for me, and takes next to no time. The birds are in a pretty small coop, and they sleep all clustered together, so the night’s prodigious pooping gets concentrated.
The birds like to perch to sleep on the edge of the nesting boxes, and depending on which way they point, they might poop in the box. They avoid laying in the dirty boxes, but rarely foul more than one a night.
Every day when I collect eggs I toss any poop or soiled nest box bedding onto the main floor, and that tends to cover the night’s mess. If they get low I put in a couple handfuls of new grass, ripped from the ground nearby. Easy. Clean feet means clean eggs, so it’s important to keep the coop well-tended so the birds aren’t wading through their own poop on the way to the box.
Every few days, I cut down some of the tall field weeds (a few seconds with the scythe), and pile it in on the floor of the coop into a soft, clean, green springy bed. It smells wonderful, especially if I get a stray sprig of mint. Any handfuls of finer stuff will top up the nest boxes.The bedding weeds dry out and shrivel up, becoming a poop and carbon lasagna.
Periodically, like once a month, I take out the whole black composting floor mat and take it to the garden in the wheelbarrow. It’s so mat-like I can practically roll it up. Anything remaining falls through the mesh that forms the floor of the coop. I add a layer of fresh green weeds and begin again.To recap, I put clean grass into the nest boxes and throw dirty nest box grass onto the floor of the coop, covering the daily poop. Every week I put a serious thick layer of fresh weeds that really spruces it up in there. Monthly I remove the composting result to the garden.
I’m not sure what we’ll keep it going with in the winter. Perhaps I’ll just scythe down half the field before the snow flies. True deep bedding method means allowing the bedding to compost for months and shovelling it out in the spring. The bedding generates heat through decomposition, which is not a summer concern. My adaptation is just a super easy way of keeping the coop clean.