…and by entertained, of course I mean freaked out and losing their minds, all you need do is clean their enclosure.
I practice the ‘deep litter’ method of keeping the stench under control. It’s simple, cheap, and best of all requires very little labor. The theory, as I understand it, (I could go look it up, but neither of us really care) is that chicken shit releases lots of nitrogen. To counteract the nitrogen, you need to release lots of carbon. Pile the enclosure deep with wood chips or straw or something like that. For added cool points, turn the whole chicken yard into a compost heap by dumping your kitchen scraps in there. The chickens will eat a lot of it. What they don’t eat will attract bugs, which the chickens will eat. To get at the stuff they like to eat they will scratch in the litter obsessively, mixing their shit in with the litter and digging into the dirt, making the whole mess deeper still.
Hey, it works. Last summer I almost stopped feeding my hens commercial pellets entirely, because they found almost all their own food – and I don’t even pasture them. Plus it doesn’t stink.
But sooner or later the chicken shit wins. Then a lot of that mess has to come out of there to make room for new. I’ve got six birds in there right now: Four pullets, #7 the PTSD’d Brahma, and Selma who gets her own little coop. They produce a lot of shit. They also produce a lot of drama when I need to rake out their yard. It’s a little annoying at times: They’re all convinced I might kill them at any time, even though I always treat them kindly. They shouldn’t have enough mind or memory to be right about the ‘kill them at any time’ thing, which of course they are. But let me do anything in there more upsetting than fill their feeder, and they lose what little minds they have.
So to keep from working in a cloud of freaked-out chickens, I have to use strategy: Open all the doors on the big coop and clean it out first. Then close all the coop doors except the small upper one. Start raking in the yard, which will send them stampeding for safety into the coop. Close the small door. Now I’ve got the place to myself. Rake out the yard, wheelbarrow the trash away, spread new straw. Then open the coop and re-pack the nesting boxes, which of course sends them stampeding out of the coop.
It’s not hard to outsmart a chicken. But it is frequently necessary, because the only way to get them to cooperate is to convince them they’re outsmarting you.
I’m taking notes; y’know, if you keep this up, you’ll convince me I don’t wanna raise chickens when/if I retire. I tried talking my 85-year-old mother into it but she wasn’t interested for some reason. She may be smarter than I thought.
Oh, no, chickens turn out to be very easy to care for. I naturally assumed that raising chickens would be like raising a garden: Easy for some, impossible for me. But that has not been the case. I’m very happy we started with chickens and have no intention of stopping. But the complications can be perplexing.
Chief among these complications is the often violent interpersonal relations of the chickens. I see pictures and videos of lush green yards decorated with calmly strutting, perfectly-feathered birds, and I wonder where these places are. If feather-picking and violence is always a sign of stress, as I keep reading, what the hell am I doing that so stresses them out? They live like queens. They’ve got plenty of square footage, clean safe coops, plenty of food and water, and things to do. What do they want, film festivals? iPads? Should I hire a clown on their birthdays? What?
Maybe start with film festivals, then work up to the clown…or show up more often with the hatchet and carrier, then laugh and walk away without catching one of them. They will be so flustered and confused they’ll forget about picking and violence. Sounds like they are bored. Have you tried tossing one or two small cabbages, some green corn cobs, large pieces of raw squash, turnips or something else they can peck into the pen? when you have access to such things. Or grow them. Oh, and, “wheelbarrow the trash away” – with that awful excuse for dirt you are gardening in, hopefully “away” means either a plastic covered compost heap until it decomposes more at which point you spread it on your raised beds and dig it in, or spread directly on beds where nothing is growing, and you dig it in and then cover the bed with plastic until the trash decomposes. If you make your covered compost heap close to the beds you won’t have to walk as far to spread it on the beds. If you put the trash directly on the beds and cover it, you’ll have more time to sit and read, watch those veggies grow, and watch the chickens calmly strutting.
How do you make it sound so much more fun and interesting than it was when we had birds? Closest we had to drama was if something upset the geese and they’d run around the yard in circles with their wings spread full out. Now that was funny.
Well, of course that’s exactly what I’m wondering. 🙂
I grew up about a mie from an egg farm (& when the wind was right–well, wrong, actually–you knew it). I knew a man near there who swore by chickenshit for fertilizer. I’ve never seen bigger, more productive tomato plants.