How to keep a chicken run dry and why it's important?
When we first got hens in 2016 I had the thought that we'd put our coop on the grass and that we'd
move it around maybe daily, every other couple days to a different new patch of grass and that
would keep the grass thriving and no one spot would get too bare, too dug up. Well I think if
you're like maybe my American relatives, my peanut butter loving relatives in America, and I still
love peanut butter too! If you've got a really big grass lawn, you're like a homestead, I was getting
ideas from people who have homesteads, really big properties, acres, they can endlessly move their
chicken sledge all over a huge grass field and of course the grass is going to look fine! I
didn't really think about what it would be in like a mini tiny patch of grass!
I just didn't consider it, I didn't think that was gonna be a problem, I thought it was gonna work!
Wet runs are not nice for hens they need a dependably dry
place to come back and keep their feet clean and healthy and have a dust bath.
So when my family moved house in 2018 it was an opportunity for us to start fresh again
with our chicken coop and make some changes about keeping the ground cover and our chicken run dry
and I'll share what we're doing now and hopefully that can help you plan for your chicken run too.
Put a roof on top of the run. Put your chicken run, you need to protect it from horizontal rains,
so if you put it in maybe a corner where it's near an out building or a solid fence or you
place plants whether they're potted or grown, like trees or shrubs, you want to protect it
with those types of sidings or the position and where you put it in the garden.
Separate the wet ground from the litter by laying down concrete pavers
or using an pre-existing concrete slab as the foundation for your chicken run.This has been lhe
crucial change for us about keeping a consistently dry chicken run by separating the wet ground earth
with the concrete and then on top of it our litter which stays dry.
On top of your pavers or your concrete slab add gritty sand, coarse sand and topsoil. For us
and where we live in the world this mix is really good at absorbing moisture and releasing it and we
try to make it as deep as we can, like up to six inches, and you do top it up occasionally because
when you when you rake out the poo most days it takes a little bit of sand and a little bit of
topsoil out with the poo every time and so you do see it go down and then you just top it back up.
Keep the litter loose, it can get compacted when I'm walking around the run
or from horizontal rains that get in through the side so occasionally I'll take a spade
and I'll loosen it up and I'll flip it over, and dry litter is great for it can get kicked
up more easily over chicken poo in the run and that reduces flies and reduces odor.
Add siding along the base of your chicken run to keep the deep litter from being
kicked out through the wire mesh. We use currently concrete blocks around the edges
and the deeper you can keep that litter and keep it in the run, is better than a thin layer
in terms of more things and deeper for them to dig, their feet can get in there nice and dry.
Deeper loose material will stay drier than a thin layer.
Hi I'm Beth from Garden City Chickens, weekly I write a blog and I make a video
about keeping backyard chickens in my little garden in the United Kingdom.
So come that first winter the grass was completely gone from that little area
and it had turned to dirt and that dirt was wet, and that became the mud, and we tried to manage
it all winter in early spring by putting down mulch, by putting on the straw and that helped
you know for a little bit but then the damp from the ground would rise back up into the mulch and
in the straw and it would get muddy again. The climate in Wales, in the United Kingdom,
there's a lot of dampness and condensation in our mild temperature year-round and it's really
lovely, I think I had a bad stereotype of it coming from the US like ooh it's cloudy and wet...
not like I had much to talk about coming from Ohio where the winters could be very cloudy and cold!
But it's so lovely, things are just green, there's like this greenness all year round in the hills,
some plants continue to bloom and grow it's just perfect weather almost for gardening and I often
am surprised when I don't even have to water my allotment garden in the summer
because it's just so damp and wet and so that's not great for a muddy run! So
the only time it would dry out this dirt patch now is if we had an unusually dry spell in Wales.
We've all seen those pristine chicken coop photos online where you've got this coop on
this pristine green grass lawn everything's new, the grass is fresh... initially that
was my photo too when we got our coop and set it up for the first week. Those photos
can be so misleading I'll pre-warn you from my experience, depending on the size of your garden
and the size of your lawn and how you set up your chicken coop, just sticking it on grass
in a small garden could be a really bad idea, at least in our circumstances because of our climate.
So my reality in the United Kingdom in Wales where I live I feel really fortunate to have
a garden at all and it's relatively a big garden compared to other gardens in the area,
so I feel really fortunate, but my garden is nothing compared to the US homesteads
I was trying to learn from, and you guys over there you're really lucky!
You've got it good in ways you don't always appreciate until you don't have it anymore!
What's the ground material like in your chicken run? Is it working for you? Is
it working for the chickens? Feel free to comment below or send me a message!
Thank you for watching and I hope I see you next week, bye!