This morning when I went to feed the chickens and pick up the eggs, I decided that really it was maybe a tad overdue, but the chicken-house needs a clean out. Over the winter it usually needs cleaning out more frequently than the summer because the chickens spend more time in there with the longer nights. But this year as most of our chickens have now taken to roosting outside and only use the house to lay eggs, it only needs doing relatively infrequently.
Outside their house however has become a bit of a mud-bath and chickens do not like getting wet feet. Whenever we have spare wood pallets, we often put them around the mud to give them places to stand, and there are lots of perches and mounds of wood, so there are plenty of places off the ground for the ladies to go, but around their feeder and water station it's "knee" deep in mud for them. Our solution to that is to put the dirty wood shavings from their house outside to help soak up some of the wet mud and they love scratching around in it. The result being though, a rapid rising of liquid mud levels as the wood mulches down and mixes into the sludge (we have had an inordinate amount of rain this winter so far).
Today was therefore a two-fold clean up operation. I first off all skimmed off the top layer of mud from those areas into my wheelbarrow to deposit on my vegetable patch. I added the manure low in shavings from the house to that mix. Then I went through the usual process of emptying the shavings out of the house into the worst affected areas outside and used the clean shavings from hubby's man cave inside. Then I took the barrow of sludge and spread it over my vegtable patch to let the rain wash the nutrients into the soil and I may even get round to digging some of it in!
A brief respite from the mud until it rains again!
And I thought I already dealt with enough poo with the kids' nappies...
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