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 wazinewhich 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.
This specific coffee container is the best scoop. I mentioned cutting milk jugs well I retract that statement. Milk jugs are hard to handle once they are cut they are way to flexible. But these things are great! I can fill baby chick feeders with ease and I measure my oyster shells in this thing and off we go with feed bag and oyster shells. If you farm you have got to drink coffee to get up as early as we do so buy some Maxwell House coffee ($5.99 with coffee at our local Wal-Mart) containers and kill two birds with one stone.
Please let me know how you re-use/repurpose things around your farm!
Recently, we had to isolate hens to see who was laying because we purchased some hens and I am questioning if they are old or just egg eaters! Anyway, we needed some feeders for the hens in captivity and I am to cheap to spend money when we are only making $31-46 per month on these hens in the first place!
I had been saving milk & OJ jugs because I just felt like they me have another purpose and I've found 4 so far!
1. A feed scoop cut off the top and dip. It has a built in handle!
2. An indivdual chicken feeder for chickens that are isolated for one reason or another.
3 To mix fish emulsion & Neem oil when I only need a small amount. I can label them and store them thus eliminating any waste!
4. Chicken poop compost tea ....this is going to be an experiment. A gallon of water and some chicken poop and I'll let them sit in the sun for a month and we'll see what kind of fertilizer it is!
I hope this helps someone other poor begining farmer out!
