Topic: chicken poo

[campanula]

I do the nest boxes everyday - but what I actually do is rake out the poo with an onion hoe, straight into a bucket. Usually a bit of straw follows. This goes straight on the compost heap. The rest of the coop is cleaned every 10 days or so. Usually, it is really easy to bundle up the newspaper on the bottom and wrap everything into a roll which also goes on the compost. In truth, I got the hens primarily for the compost - eggs are a bonus!

[grannyjanny]

I cleaned my chickens out for the first time yesterday (got them a week ago). What a disappointment. There was hardly any poo, I suppose bantams don't do much. I obviously need more than four ;D ;D ;D.I picked it out & put it with the mound from the guinea pigs. At least it is hemcore so it will be worth while in the long run. Perhaps if I could keep them off the nesting boxes at night I would get more.

[JHedgerow]

We keep our 13 chickens in a 6x4 shed with a 20ft run attached.  We have gone through lots of revamps to get what I call the most work free version to date.  We have perches for them at night accessed by a ramp.  Nest boxes with rollaway nest inserts and a shelf above the nest boxes with some large plastic trays in for those chickens who prefer to sleep in a nest type thing.  We fill them with shavings.  The floor has deep litter of 3 or 4 inches of shavings dusted liberally with diatom powder.  We "poo pick" every day from the trays removing any soiled shavings and dispose in the compost.  We stir up the shavings or scrape the poop off the ramps every couple of days.  That is all we do.  We clean out the deep stuff about once a month and hose the removable perches and ramps down.  Biodry powder under the litter keeps it smelling OK and dry.  A complete clean takes about 30 minutes.  http://www.solwayrecycling.co.uk/products/hen-houses.asp would recommend looking at these for a coop.  Looks better than the eglu, less cramped.  We found the eglu more difficult to clean than our shed.  They can also go indoors in bad weather to mooch around.  Shavings are much more absorbent than straw.

[Paulines7]

My five hens have a 20ft x 10ft house plus a run in one of my six vegetable beds.  I give the house a good clean every three months and treat the perch with red mite powder.  Everyday, I clean out any poo I see that has been left in the nest box.  Normally there is not any.  I also sweep any poo on the floor to under the perch where I have shredded paper.

I have never noticed a smell but then they do most of their poo outside, fertilising the beds for the following year.  When I clean out their shed, it all goes on the compost heap.

I imagine with an igloo it would need to be cleaned each day.  Whether you could leave it for two weeks will depend on how many chickens you have in it and how big their run is.