[Beekissed]

This year has been a great year for my DL in the coop, with many wheelbarrow loads of silty, fine composted material taken from the coop and placed on the garden~which is one of the great benefits of this method.  It composts in place, instead of having to move it twice.  Now that I've got it working well, it's really producing the compost!  This is the first year I've ever got to remove that much material and still have so much DL still in the coop. 

I've been placing all my garden and canning scraps in the area next to the roosting site, where they are either eaten or scratched under the DL, there to be eaten by worms or turned into compost.  I've also placed many weeds and flower stems from cleaning out the annual beds in that area, where it's now composting down with a layer of leaves on top of it. 

This time of year is when I really get to put the good stuff in the coop...loads and loads of leaves.  Then, all winter long, I'll be putting even more leaves on, as the need for dry bedding comes along.  Mixed in with that are pine needles and cones, twigs, small bits of grass, hay, bark, wood chips and even a little straw.  No pine shavings, though.  I haven't used those for a couple of years now, as I found them too slow to decompose...and they cost money. 

This coop smells fresh~not one smell of chicken poop or flies can be found~and it's producing compost at a wonderful rate.  By next spring I'll have plenty for side dressing plants and I don't have to worry about it being too hot to use as it will be fully composted and ready for use. 

Anyone else working on a DL in the coop and run to use on the garden?   

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Not to the extent you do Beekissed, but I did empty out the big run in the last week and use the old litter to top dress a large flower bed in my garden.  This is a large run based around a garden pergola, with Foghorn and his 6 girls in residence.

It starts with bagged bark chips.  These are sold as a soil dressing to suppress weeds over here, but they are not expensive and I got a good deal at the garden centre.  I will add leaves, grass mowings and various bits of green waste to it.  The chickens work away at it and over summer, I hose it down regularly to keep it clean.  It comes back out about 6 months later as dark, crumbly soil with the odd small piece of bark in it.  The flower bed will probably grow a few wheat plants from missed seeds, but I pull these up and chuck them back in the run as the chickens love wheat grass.

Alphie's set up for him and his 2 girls is an eglu coop and run, which is on what is left of the lawn.  He gets moved around onto fresh grass regularly, but deep litter is not practical for him.

[Beekissed]

It sounds like lovely compost!  I love that dark, crumbly nature of it and the clean, rich smell of earth.  Do your flowers seem to show the difference?  Mine show more vivid coloring and deeper green leaves from this rich stuff. 

I had a dandelion trying to reach into the composting area of the coop from the outside...that thing was 2 ft wide and the main stem grew to 3 ft. tall when left alone.  Took both hands and all my weight to pull that thing out of the soil...the taproot was 8 in. long!   

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It is great compost and the flowers do respond to it 

I noticed yesterday I have some prize nettles growing at the side of coop amongst the comfrey.  I will have to wade down there and root them out.  Shame they are a weed, as they are the lushest and most beautiful specimens I have ever seen 

[Beekissed]

A wonderful weed to have!!!!  http://www.herballegacy.com/Vance_Medicinal.html

I'd dry those and use them now and again in the chicken's food...good for them!  You might even enjoy their benefits yourself.   

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I could dry them for chicken feed.  They will have to go from where they are as they will stop me getting to the comfrey without getting stung, but there are plenty more down at my allotment site.

People here say they are a sign of fertile soil and they must be, because the best ones there are all growing down by the communal green waste dump 

[Beekissed]

They are also said to make for wonderful compost and a nutritional tea for plants...very nutrient dense plant, from what I've gathered on the topic. 

Dumped a huge quantity of leaves in the coop today, the season's first big offering of leaves, though I had placed small bits earlier on.  I have plenty of leaves stored for winter bedding now and then some.  Have been collecting leaves from people in town and have collected 181 large bags of leaves, pine needles, grass clippings, etc. thus far.  Most will go on the garden, but some was stored for bedding and such. 

Deep litter in the coop, deep litter on the garden....it all just makes perfect sense and makes both areas pleasant to work in. 

[LRD]

I'd really like some advice on this.  I have two runs, one that I put my girls in during the day, we only built it this summer it consists of 6 foot high wire mesh panels resting on the garden soil, with an anti dig skirt of wire mesh around the outside.  I live in London where urban daytime foxes are very common and we built it as a fox proof daytime run for when we are not in the garden.  The other run encloses the coop and has a paving stone floor which we installed after we had a big problem with rats tunneling in. The problems I have are that the flagstone floor is boring and the girls can't scratch about, they have a big dust box & we put bark in there as well.  The floor ends up very yukky and smelly. The daytime soil based run has been great all summer but now the weather has turned the floor has turned into a mud bath, I put a huge pile of leaves in there last week thinking that they'd keep the girls out of the mud & that they'd compost down.  Yesterday I spent the afternoon raking out a stinking sour mass of horrible leaves. The run still smells revolting even though I've taken the leaves out I don't want to put the girls in there for fear of disease. Should I have put a mixture of stuff on the floor? is bark from the garden centre OK to use? one of the chicken product sites advises against it saying that it harbours mould spores and that hard wood chippings should be used instead. Could I use the deep litter approach you describe on the paving stones in the other run?

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I don't have a run with a paved floor, but we have had forum members saying they use bark chips over them.

As regards your soil run, you need a mix of materials with some chunkier things that allow for drainage.  Leaves alone will compact down to a smelly mess.  I have used bark chips as a base for my deep litter for years and have never had a problem.  I do avoid very wet heavy bags from the garden centre.  If they do seem damp, I set them on end under cover to dry out before use.

My run is also roofed with cross beams and clear corrugated plastic, which really helps over winter 

[Sassy]

If folk use bark chips successfully that is good, however a specialist chicken vet advised to never use bark as it harbours aspergilous (sp) spores 

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Bark used alone in an uncovered run does get wet and can get mould growing in it.  Both Beekissed and I have roofed runs with a mix of materials, which is a bit different 

Get friendly with your local garden centre and they will open a new pallet and give you the dry bags from that.  The bark comes out of the bag smelling good and with no trace of mould.  You don't have to use bark.  If you read back on this thread, there are all sorts of things suggested, but think compost heap.  You need fibrous items to add air to the mix.

As I have said, I have never had problems, but like all things, you need to do your homework and make sure you understand the basic principles.  My oldest bantam hen is 10 and admittedly she is most definitely in the twilight of her years, but she still enjoys a good scratch round in the litter.  Just at a far more gentle pace these days 

[Beekissed]

I don't actually have a roofed run...as I have no run at all, but use the DL in my coop.     And I allow rain and melting snow into the coop to get good moisture into the leaves and material to be found there...can't compost without the moisture. 

As for the spores, they are present in nature and in any composting mass of materials.  They cannot be escaped, no matter what the vet says, as they grow in soil as well.  As long as your run as good airflow through it, they won't cause a bit of problem.  The only time mold spores become a danger is when the birds are enclosed in an area with mold spores present and the air is continually stale~such as in a house or in coops that are not well ventilated.  In and open run, it's much like as if the chickens were just living on a forest floor. 

Deep litter has to be deep, so if you merely had a few inches of wet, matted leaves in the run, I could see where it would turn out to be a nasty mess.  Try mixing different particle sizes, throwing in the bark, twigs, woody plant stems and anything else that can decompose at different rates and still provide air pockets in the litter.  If built deeply enough~even on the stone floor~it should start to work well, while wicking the moisture into the bottom layers and leaving the top fairly springy and merely moist. 

You have a small run, so you might want to either flip the manure under the bedding weekly~just a shallow flip of the top layer~ or put a new layer of dry leaves or material on top.  It's like lasagna gardening, so think of layering and keeping the manure in the layers.  Once you get it deep enough and with varied materials, the chickens will do much of that for you.

Either way you do it, decomposing plant material is going to have any number of mold/fungi spores in it, breaking it down.  As long as you provide fresh air flow into that space, your birds shouldn't suffer one bit.   

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Sorry Beekissed    Your coop is equivalent to a decent size coop and run set-up over here, so I think I just had a picture of it in my head and said that without thinking 

Mine has wire mesh sides, so the air and rain gets in, but the roof keeps the worst off of the weather off.  The rain in winter can be relentless and go on for weeks here.  My chickens got a large bag of leaves to add to the mix today.  They were enthusiastically digging through them for hours 

[Beekissed]

I just emptied approx. 100 bags of leaves on my garden and my flock are now doing the same.  For some reason they think there will be instant bugs under those leaves, just because you give them a pile to sort through.     The leaves are so deep they are just wading through, climbing over, struggling to find a spot to stand balanced and give a scratch. 

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I've just seen your pictures in 'What I did on the plot today'.  Your hens must have been beside themselves with that lot to go at