- All right, let's feed these chickens
some treats this morning.
They're really gonna like these,
they love the black soldier fly larvae.
Wait...
Is there a new breed in there?
What is that hen? (both laugh)
- It saw a little bit of corn.
- Get outta my coop, dude.
- Let me take myself over. - Get outta my coop.
(both laughing)
Today is the "Chicken Coop Cleanout."
(bright upbeat music)
So today it's a nice, gloomy October day
and while the coop is perfectly functional,
it works amazingly, it's getting a little dirty
and I think it's time to hit it
with some seriously heavy-duty gear.
So we're gonna power wash it, we're gonna troubleshoot,
I'm gonna show you a couple additions that I've made,
and we're adding some more hemp bedding
and we have a special, little, broody, Butter hen in there
that I need to consult Jacque on some strategies for.
- Yeah, she's a little buttered up right now-
- She's a little buttered up.
So, where should we start, Jacque?
Why don't we do a little cleaning?
- Yeah, I'd say we do some cleaning,
get the chickens a little bit scared,
and then we could reward them afterwards-
- With some treats-
- Be like, "Here you go, it's all fine."
- Let's do that. - We're just cleaning up.
- Okay, before I hit this with the power washer,
I need to close the vents,
which is really easy to do with the little dowel system
that they've got at Carolina Coops.
And then while I'm doing this, Jacque,
you're hitting the inside, yeah?
- Yeah, I'm actually gonna clean up the inside a little bit,
rake up any detritus, debris like corn cobs
that I've been gnawing on.
- By the way- - Give it a little refresh.
- This guy loves to say detritus.
That's his favorite word to say,
I've never heard a guy say detritus more in my life.
- That's a good word. - It felt like
a hundred times.
- It's underutilized.
I'm gonna close this inner vent,
become one with the chickens here.
- [Jacque] Okay, I think we're good,
so watch where you're spraying, you know?
- Yeah, you wanna get smacked? (both laugh)
No, the reason I'm doing the power wash guys
is 'cause if I hose it off, some of the more caked-on dust
just really doesn't come off.
There's a big difference between washing it,
and then giving it the actual shine,
'cause it gets down to about this level of cleanliness,
it just looks way better, so here we go.
(machine whirring)
- [Jacque] Chickens are not amused.
- How do they like it, Jacque?
- They don't. (both laughing)
- They don't.
They don't, it's not so much that it's the noise,
it's the fact that water's getting in the coop,
they hate it, it's crazy.
But, we're doing it for them.
(gentle country music)
This used to be for the chickens,
you can see this is even covered in poop,
I gotta have power wash this before I even use it.
(machine whirring)
- [Jacque] Wow, I didn't know it had color.
(both laugh)
- I honestly didn't- I thought it was gray,
I honestly didn't know it was blue.
- Well, these chickens are definitely corn fed.
Yeah, they've been munching down
some of that fresh organic- - They've been munching.
- Homestead corn.
- Yeah. - Of course.
- Yeah, all the corn that got way too eaten up
by the corn worms,
I just screwed onto this little apparatus,
I'll show you when we actually give you a little tour
of some modifications we made inside.
(gentle country music)
Now I'm gonna get some of the door and edging here.
- [Jacque] Maybe I should pop out for that one.
- You might wanna pop out for that.
'Cause this is where they kinda hang
when you come up to give 'em the treats,
so this just gets pooped on like crazy.
- Oh, it looks a lot nicer.
- It's a lot nicer, right?
- Should help keep it cooler.
- Wow, some of that's really baked on there,
probably need to be scrubbed off.
- Hit it with the old corn cob.
- Yeah, how much better does that?
- It looks a lot better.
- Is the corn cob bringing it off?
- Oh, yeah, it actually is.
- Is that old corn cob? - That old hermit trick.
- Oh, wow, this one came straight from the area.
- Always come with a corn cob in your pocket,
you never know. - This one came straight
from the streets of Bulgaria guys.
Check this out, even doing- - Oh yeah.
- Watch this.
- [Jacque] It looks like brown.
chickens are definitely not happy there-
- No they don't like this.
(Jacque laughing)
No, but it's, I've done this before
and they,
they eventually - They're fine.
- They're fine. - They'll get over it.
- Go back the other way guys.
(slow bluesy music)
All right girls.
- [Jacque] Okay. - [Kevin] Sorry,
but I'm coming in.
- [Jacque] Let me try to get 'em...
- [Kevin] Yeah, corral 'em out over to that area.
- [Jacque] Come on Lev.
- [Kevin] There we go.
- [Jacque] Good girls.
All right, we need to get this water bar
'cause they've made a mess of it.
- Yeah, we'll get the water bar
and we'll get this little entrance,
we'll get the door.
Okay, well the door might need old Bulgarian corn cob
because that thing's not, nothing's happening there.
We're gonna get the water bar because, and I don't,
I think it's just them
kicking dust up- - Yeah.
- And then it's moist enough.
So this will get dirty nearly immediately after this,
but I wanna make it look nice.
(mellow jazz music)
I think we've annoyed the girls enough.
- [Jacque] Yeah, I think that's like an definitely
a lot better.
- It looks way cleaner.
- Yeah. - Way cleaner.
Okay, we have the hemp bedding from Carolina Coops,
this is why we waited to do this afterwards,
'cause if any moisture got in there,
adding the hemp bedding will help soak it up
so let's pop the back open, Jacque, I grab a rake.
I'll use a potato fork, in honor of you.
There's not actually anything we have to do, but I think
like a little quality of life for the hens would be nice.
- Sure.
- So we have the dropdown system here
and I'll just kind of show you the depth, Jacque,
that we're working with.
- Yeah, 'cause this is deep litter,
as the system for the actual coop.
- Yeah, it's about, it's a little over a foot I think
but we don't have a ton of depth in the deep litter
right now.
Okay, here's what we'll do.
First of all we'll discuss why there's a little henny hen
in here just looking like a fat blob
and that would be Butter.
Come around and take a look Ian,
Butter is just sitting here, she does not give a single care
in the world, she's sitting there,
so she's become broody, Jacque.
- [Jacque] Yeah.
- And you have a Buff Orpington that has also
become broody.
- Buff Orpingtons are very broody hens
because they are really good mothers,
so they're really "cheap" in terms of you could get them
for cheap compared to other chickens
'cause they go broody a lot,
'cause they really get our hatching eggs.
Now broodiness can be problematic
because basically they stop laying eggs
and then they also hog the nesting box
and make all the other chickens mad.
Our chickens will pick on the broody hen
because they're like over it, like-
- Yeah, they'll actually literally pick at Trip though,
yeah, that's the crazy, I've not seen that happen.
What I've noticed is, when one of my hen wants to lay,
'cause they only use that one box,
when one of my hen's wants to lay, Butter will leave-
- [Jacque] Wow. - Yeah, she'll leave
and she'll stand on the roosting bar
and be puffy as heck
and then she'll be like, "Come on bro, like finish up,"
and then
it's like a bathroom- - I'm just trying
to sit on an egg.
- Yeah. And then they lay the egg
'cause every day Butter will be the only one there-
- [Jacque] Yeah. - But somehow five,
four or five eggs are underneath there.
So, we're gonna go back to our hemp bedding
from Carolina Coops, which is, to our knowledge at least
both Jacque and I's favorite bedding.
- Yeah, the hemp bedding has really worked wonders for us.
- [Kevin] So in we go, I think we could probably get away
with a full bag?
- [Jacque] Might as well since the bag split.
- [Kevin] Yeah.
- And the nice thing about hemp,
so we did have some original shavings in there,
some wood shavings from our first batch of bedding
before we got the hemp.
But what he was telling us, Matt from Carolina,
was saying like, you don't need to do anything,
you just dump it in there, they'll dig it up,
they'll mix it up, it'll compost on its own
and it's kind of like a self-correcting system.
- Yeah.
- So the hemp is really nice
and it composts really easily,
so it's gonna be a great soil amendment in the future.
- Take a look at the medium of it.
It's actually very reminiscent to the garden straw
that we have in the store?
- Yeah, it's like all surface area-
- 'Cause it's crosscut and then it's split.
- Yeah.
- Which means that the surface area is super high.
- Right, it's gonna soak up any of that chicken remain.
- Okay, so there we go.
And I, you know, I understand Matt's point, but I'm-
- [Jacque] Yeah, I know. - Still gonna level it out
a little bit.
- [Jacque] I agree.
- [Kevin] Mine just dig holes in the corners of everything.
- [Jacque] I know.
- [Kevin] And so I have to like,
they'll get down to the actual-
- [Jacque] Yeah. - [Kevin] Polycarbonate
down there. - It's really funny
'cause they have a boundary,
they're like, "Oh yeah, that's where I'm gonna dig,
that's where I'm gonna make a little hole."
I don't know what it is, some sort of weird instinct.
- Perhaps like, if you think about them as tree jungle foul,
like foraging foul,
like where would they be most likely to find things?
Like, right where a log
is lying- - Right.
- On the ground
or something like that. - It makes sense, yeah.
- These are prey animals guys.
(Jacque laughing)
- These guys-
- They're not the top of the food chain.
- They are not the top of the food chain at all.
So Butter's still hanging out in there.
- [Jacque] She doesn't care.
- [Kevin] Just gonna let her be.
So we're at a much higher point now, of course
that will settle down. - [Jacque] It'll settle.
- And then I'll do a couple little tweaks here.
So what they'll do is, there's a little, like roost bar
that helps you get into the nesting box
and they tend to like sit on it, wait their turn
and like kind of poop on it,
so I just scrape a little bit of that off.
- [Jacque] I see.
- I don't need to like go clean it-
- No, no. - Or scour it,
but I just don't want like big old chunks sitting there.
Yeah, Butter literally looks- - [Jacque] It's so funny.
- She looks like she's made out of ice,
she just isn't doing anything.
- [Jacque] She's like, "If I don't move he won't touch me."
- Yeah, well I'm gonna touch her.
Come here.
There's that sound.
- [Jacque] The sound broody chicken's make is amazing.
- And she's puffing up. - She's like a Pokemon.
She honestly sounds like a Pokemon.
- And she just poofed up.
- Yeah, look here. - She like doubled in volume.
- Okay, watch, so look, look at her poof,
so she's gonna calm down, watch.
Butter, I'm just trying to connect.
I'm just trying to connect with you.
Now the surprising thing though, Jacque,
is that they're rope wrap brew bars,
there's zero debris or detritus on them at all,
they worked amazingly well.
- I'm surprised cause I'm like, rope?
I mean they don't even seem to poop on it or anything.
- They don't. - They just go
right over the edge. - You know why though?
Think about it, hanging their butt's
just not all on top of it, you know?
- Yeah, it's just, it's right here.
- It's right on the edge.
Okay, so we've solved the back of the henhouse.
- [Jacque] Yeah.
- Let's go ahead and go inside
and I'll show you a couple mods that we made.
- [Jacque] All right.
- Before we go in, I wanna see if we can annoy Butter
just a little bit more
and see what she's trying to hatch, so there's that booty.
So excuse me, there goes the fluff,
I'm just gonna lift her up just a little bit-
- [Jacque] Oh wow.
- Oh she's houses some golden eggs, there's four.
- [Jacque] Not a bad start.
- There you go, okay, sorry Butter.
Maybe she will realize there's nothing there,
I doubt it though, I really doubt it.
- Nah, I think she's connected to her primal instinct
right now.
- [Kevin] Oh wow, they're bathing, look at 'em.
They're all dust bathing, they're going to town on that,
probably got like a little splash of water.
- [Jacque] They honestly look like little colored rock,
like look at Lobster, look at this girl.
- [Kevin] What, they just like flipped over it.
- [Jacque] Oh my God.
- So one thing that we did here is,
I wanted a more interactive way 'cause
I haven't expanded the run to an outdoor run yet,
that's coming soon.
But I wanted an interactive way for them to eat
instead of just eating out of the coop works feeder,
which I obviously love
but let's give them some more activity.
So what I did is I threw a little eye hook here,
I got some canvas or lanyard and then I put a carabiner
into a very simple eye hook with a screw
and so what you can do is anything that can take this type
of threading, corn being the perfect example,
you can just screw on and it'll kind of flow here.
We have some funny footage of them really enjoying it,
so that's one modification that we made.
And then over here I tried to do a like hanging swing thing,
they did not like it at all,
I think as soon as they jumped up
it would swing outta the way
and they just weren't stable enough.
And so my girlfriend actually built this little
playground that's nice and stable,
they can't really knock things
over 'cause they're, they tend to just knock things
outta the way.
- Yeah, right, and they look like
they're definitely using it based on the poop.
- Well they use it all the time,
because the only area that sun comes in,
it's like halfway through the day
but half of the day sun streams in
right here. - Oh, I see.
- So they'll just kinda like hang out and chill right here.
- Nice. - So besides the feeder,
that's really the only changes that I've made.
Although Jacque, you have, on your new video
you've got the waterer,
- Yeah. - The water bar thing.
- Yeah, I really like that too
because it's something you could place
in the ground permanently, out of the way
and they love it
and it keeps- And you hammer,
'cause you hammer that one in,
right? - Yeah, it's like in there,
so it's not tipping over,
and you're not digging it out, it's great.
- Well we'll leave our little pebbled egg, egg birds,
we'll leave them to do what they're doing.
- [Jacque] Wow, they're so dusty.
- Well I think we've given the chickens a nice,
refreshed home to hang out in
and if you wanna see what this looked like
when we put it in, check this video out.
Until next time, good luck in the garden
and keep on growing.