Cleaning the Chicken Coop

This is a pic of the access area at the back with the two doors open. We open these two doors to clean the roosting area which is just above the nest boxes. When the chickens sleep on their roosting bars at night, they generate a lot of poop. Their poop falls through the welded wire floor which is about 12 inches below the wooden roost bars and it settles on top of the river sand that is at the bottom of the 8-inches high green box. There is a hook attached to the ceiling to hold the welded wire floor as seen in the picture above. The ceiling over the roosting area is covered with a plywood.

In cleaning the coop, we first take off the wooden roost bars from their slots. The slots are made of metal and the wooden bars are made to fit snugly in them. The roost bars are about 4-inches high above the welded wire floor.

Then we lift off the entire wire floor and hook it up on a wire that is attached to the ceiling just for this purpose. This gives us the space to reach out to the farthest part of the box to clean the poop.  

Then we use a sifter such as the one that my nephew Jim is holding to separate the chicken manure from the river sand. The sifter is actually a kitchen utensil that is used for taking out the food when doing deep frying. Their poop is usually concentrated in one spot and fortunately for us, it is always near the two doors so it's easy to clean it up.

I have been doing a lot of research on the Internet about the kind of litter to use in the chicken coop and run. Finally I settled to using rough river sand in the chicken run and wood chips as litter over concrete floor in the chicken coop. We also use river sand underneath their roosting bars. The river sand dries up the poop and these can be easily scooped up with a strainer.  We put the poop in a covered compost container. When the container is almost full, we bring this to the big garden on the hill where they are dried before being used as fertilizer.  Since this is now the rainy season here in the Philippines, we could not dry the manure so these will have to be stored in the compost bins for four months or until the weather improves. There are no houses over at the hill garden so it's the best place for us to dry the chicken manure, that way no neighbors will have to complain about the odour.  Besides, this hill garden is where we will be using the chicken dung as fertilizer for the coffee trees and banana trees that are planted there.

Litter in the Coop

This is the chicken coop with the door open. The bottom of the front wall about 1/4 of it is covered with scrap tin materials over a concrete base. The rest of the upper wall is made of 1 x 1 inch wire mesh material so it is very airy inside and this serves as the coop's ventilation. 

This pic is inside the coop with wood chips as litter over the concrete floor.

We use wood chips as litter on the floor inside the chicken coop which we sourced out from a furniture shop along the National Highway in La Trinidad Benguet. The owner is giving these away for free as long as we do the bagging ourselves because his workers were busy with their own work. He said that we just missed some people who were there ahead of us to get some wood chips since they too are using it as litter in their pigsty. So I bought three empty feed sacks from across the street and filled these up with the wood chips. Luckily for me, my young nephew Jim was with me so he helped me in bagging the wood chips. The only expense we made was for the cost of the 3 feed sacks at 12 pesos each or a total of 36 pesos and the expense for the taxi which amounted to 60 pesos from La Trinidad Benguet to our house in Baguio City.

When we arrived home, we spread out the wood chips over the concrete floor inside the chicken coop. The three sacks of wood chips just about covered the whole floor at 2-inches deep. I wish I had taken more wood chips but then again, the ones that we did not bag were really more of a saw dust and I read on the Internet that this is not good for the chicken's lungs which is why we did not bag all of them. We have been getting a lot of rains lately because this is the rainy season now in the Philippines and the litter was getting damp. However, it's been sunny for the past two days and the litter on the floor dried up fast. This is what I like about wood chips, it's capacity to dry up fast. Anyway, I will have to get more wood chips to top off the litter because it looks like it could use another inch or two. To make the wood chips friable, we throw cracked corn on the floor and the chickens love to scratch and this loosens up the wood chips on the floor. I read somewhere that some people use Diatomatous Earth or DM over the litter in the coop but I am not sure if we have that here in the Philippines. I'll have to ask around the agricultural shops if they carry this product.