It took me about 3 hours to complete this task. As we have recently changed our feed from to a combination of scratch & feed I hope that the strong ammonia smell will be less during the next cleaning. The Encyclopedia of Country living said we should clean the chicken coop once a year. I am not going to be following this guideline and we will try to clean it every 4 months. Hopefully, this will cut down the amount of time it took me to clean this house out.
We really shy away from the use of strong chemicals with our animals. We worm our chickens with vinegar instead of wazine which had a million warnings that scared me to death! So when I went to clean the coop I wanted a nice clean coop and my goal is to kill any nasty parasites living in the manure.
- Shovel out the house and get as much manure out as possible.
- Rake the house and get out more.
- Shovel it again and focus on 'stuck to the floor manure'
- hose it down
- sweep it out with a chicken coop specific broom. You do not want to sweep your porch with this thing after it's been in the coop!
- Mop it (We use a retired mop for this job again you do not want to clean your kitchen floor with the same broom you use in the kitchen house.) I mop with a water & vinegar solution to kill germs in the least toxic way possible. Additionally, if the chickens drink some of the solution nothing bad happens to them they just get wormed!
Vinegar Solution: 3/4 cup of vinegar + 1 gallon of water
I also realize we need a scrapper and a forked scooper to help make this task easier. This is a future expense that we will do without until absolutely necessary. In the future we are going to go to dirt floors it will be much easier for us to maintain. We will use our current house for broilers as we will both have fewer and house them for less time.
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