When we first moved to the country and built our chicken coop, we did what most newbie chicken owners do, and that is search the Internet to try to find a good chicken coop ideas.
One piece of advice that we found pretty consistently turned out to be disastrous for us. So today, I’m going to share with you one simple quick thing we did to fix this mistake and how you can build a better chicken coop right off the bat.
We’ve had this coop for about nine years now. We built this right after we moved in. It’s an eight by eight coop with an eight by 16 foot run. I typically have 20 to 25 chickens in there. And then during the summer, I also open it up to Premier One electric netting (see my post on this amazing netting).
The Big Mistake First Time Chicken Coop Builders Make
All right, here we have our run and our wonderful little coop in here. When we first built this coop, we did what most people do and have an enclosed coop and then have a run that is enclosed with purely chicken wire or hardware cloth, but no roof, no walls, no anything.
We bedded the coop deeply, but we did nothing with the run. And because of that, we ended up with a muddy mess super fast.
You see, chickens love to scratch in the dirt. When they’re using their feet to scratch up the dirt, peck for bugs and look for grass, they quickly turn your small run into dirt.
When it rains and snows, it turns into mud. And then you add manure in there and it’s like ick slurry.
Add Deep Bedding to Prevent your Run from Getting too Dirty and Gross
Within a little while, we knew something had to change, and I knew that a vital part of that change was deep bedding. Now, deep bedding is basically adding straw old hay woodchips, any carbon material down onto the ground and lots of it.
That way the chickens’ manure is going to be mixed in with all this carbon and it’s going to compost, not stink.
All that nitrogen in the chicken manure is going to be locked down with that carbon and you’re not going to have a slimy, icky, smelly mess.
So deep bedding was key, but I knew I did not want the bedding to get rained down and snowed on because that would still turn my deep bedding into a wet mess. That’s when I realized the big mistake that we had made with our coop.
We had done the typical thing, which is to just enclose the run with chicken wire or hardware cloth. But because of that, our run was getting disgusting.
Prevent your Chicken Run from Getting Gross by Enclosing the Run with a Roof
What we needed to do was enclose the run to prevent moisture from getting in so that we could deeply bed the run just like we did for the coop.
I’m going to show you what our coop looks like now that we have this roofing. I will show you the ground and you can see just how amazing this new system is.
What we ended up doing was putting clear plastic panels along the roof. You can see the hardware cloth is still there. If you’ve already built your coop, you don’t need to remove or redo anything.
It’s a super easy fix to just put these clear plastic roofing panels up on top of it.
Weather Screens Help to Prevent Rain and Snow from Entering the Chicken Run
On the north side, I also ended up putting a weather screen and this prevents a lot of snow from piling up inside in the winter. This change made a huge difference in helping me care for my chickens during the winter.
It also prevents rain from filling the chicken run because we typically get our weather from the north northwest side. So those two things mean the bedding is able to stay nice and dry.
Now, looking here, I just put down a new layer of old hay two days ago now. This bedding is probably about a foot deep now, so it’s not super deep, but look at this stuff. It is beautiful. The chicken scratch in it, they peck in it. We put a lot of our food scraps in here, and we also put down some grain to encourage them to scratch and peck through the hay.
Our Gross Chicken Run Turned to Low Smell and Low Maintenance
The best part is our chicken run is now turning into the most amazing compost.
It doesn’t smell, it doesn’t stink, it’s not muddy. It’s a nice, clean environment for the chickens.
And it’s super easy to maintain. All I have to do is add bedding every couple of weeks and then clean it out maybe once a year. I haven’t cleaned out the run in probably two years.
So if you are a new chicken owner just getting started looking for ideas or building your coop, I could not recommend this enough.
Don’t just build your chicken run with a normal chicken wire or hardware cloth enclosure. Make sure you put a roof on your chicken run and add something to protect them from rain and snow so that you can deeply bed your run just like your coop and avoid the mess, slime, stink, manure.
