Storey's Guide to Raising Chickens (37 page)

Repair roof leaks and correct drainage problems that cause indoor puddling.

Insulate the ceiling, if necessary, to prevent winter condensation from dripping on litter.

Add fresh litter more often or decrease the number of birds housed.

Aerate the litter more often by loosening and turning it.

Provide good ventilation to remove excess moisture from the air.

You can keep a flock on the same composting litter for years, provided the bedding doesn’t get damp and remains warm, and no serious disease breaks out. On the other hand, if you need the nitrogen-rich bedding to fertilize your garden or you live where summers are quite warm, you may wish to clean the house each spring and begin the summer with fresh, cool litter.

If frequent disease outbreaks in your area make the reuse of litter unwise or if you raise successive batches of birds for short production periods, instead of composting litter, use deep litter: When you bring in a batch of new birds, spread the cleaned floor with 6 inches (15 cm) of fresh bedding. During the production period, stir the litter as necessary to prevent surface matting. At the end of each production period, remove the litter and thoroughly clean the coop.

Smart poultry keepers don’t look at manure as a nuisance waste product but as a valuable commodity that may be used or sold for gardening. The combination of aged manure and litter has average nitrogen (N), phosphate (P), and potash (K) values of 1.8, 1.4, and 0.8, respectively (as percentages of total weight), outranking most other barnyard droppings.

A good minimum yearly application is 45 pounds — approximately the amount produced by one hen each year — per 100 square feet of garden. (In approximate metric equivalents, a minimum application on a 10 sq m garden is 23 kg.) A generous application is 90 pounds per 100 square feet. (In metric equivalents, for a 10 sq m area, a generous application is 45 kg, or about a 4.5 cm layer.) In practical terms, if you spread a 1-inch (2.5 cm) layer over 100 square feet (9.3 sq m) of soil, you’ll have applied roughly 55 pounds (25 kg); a 1½-inch (3.8 cm) layer will give you just under 90 pounds (40 kg).

Never feed growing plants fresh chicken manure — its high nitrogen content is hot enough to burn them. Furthermore, the excessive amount of nitrogen in
fresh droppings encourages unbalanced plant growth, such as weak plant stalks and forked carrot roots.

FERTILIZER VALUE OF CHICKEN MANURE

The fertilizer value of chicken manure varies with its age and also with the nutritional intake of birds at various stages of growth.

Row-crop farmers generally prefer to spread fresh manure over bare soil and turn it under at the end of the growing season in autumn, giving the manure time to age in the ground over winter. This practice, called “sheet composting”, requires keeping chickens off the cropland for at least a year to prevent the spread of disease and parasites.

Many gardeners prefer to compost the manure for spring application to growing plants. Composting not only transforms nitrogen into a form that’s readily usable without damaging plants but also destroys bacteria, viruses, coccidia, and parasitic worm eggs. Built-up litter composts naturally, stabilizing or fixing both nitrogen and potash in the process.

Raw manure that’s composted without being mixed with some carbon-containing substance (shavings, straw, weeds, grass clippings, and the like) will overheat and dry into a powdery white nutrient-poor ashy substance called
fire fang
. If you’re not an experienced composter, you can find all the information you need in any good book on gardening. My favorite is
Gardening When It Counts,
by Steve Solomon.

The claws and beaks of chickens are made of keratin, the same substance as your fingernails and toenails, and like your nails, they continually grow. Chickens evolved in an environment in which their claws and beaks naturally remained in balance by wearing down as they grew. But in backyard confinement sometimes they grow too long and need to be trimmed. A cock’s spurs, too, can grow too long for the bird’s comfort.

A chicken uses its claws to scratch the ground for food and also to scratch an itch. When a chicken doesn’t have hard surfaces to scratch its claws against, they continue to grow until they curl, and then the chicken can’t walk properly.

Nails that don’t wear down naturally need to be periodically trimmed. Cocks have their claws trimmed to prevent injury to hens during breeding, and chickens groomed for show must have their nails neatly trimmed.

How often claws need trimming depends on how fast they grow. And the rate of growth depends on the environment and the time of year, so keep an eye on the claws and trim them as often as necessary.

Use a pair of canine toenail clippers or heavy shears, and finish by filing away sharp edges. Trim away small amounts at a time to avoid snipping a nail too
short. If you should accidentally draw blood, stop the bleeding by applying an astringent such as witch hazel, styptic powder, or alum or encourage rapid clotting with a little flour or cornstarch.

A chicken uses its beak for gathering food and also for exploring and manipulating objects in the environment, preening, nesting, and engaging in social interactions. A beak that grows out of balance interferes with the chicken’s ability to eat and enjoy other activities that are necessary for its well-being.

In a natural setting, the beak wears down as fast as it grows. The chicken wipes its beak on the ground to clean it, at the same time sharpening the beak for pecking and keeping it from growing too long. The upper half of the beak is naturally a tad longer than the lower half, but when a chicken lacks opportunities to keep it worn down to a proper length, the upper half grows so long it interferes with eating and other activities.

When the upper half just begins to overlap the lower half, you can trim it back with a fingernail file. Once it has passed the filing stage, use toenail clippers or the same canine clippers used on claws. If you don’t let the upper beak grow too far, the part that needs to be trimmed away will be lighter in color than the rest of the beak. When in doubt, look inside the chicken’s mouth and you can see where the live tissue ends.

Trim a little at a time to make sure you don’t get into live tissue and cause pain and bleeding. In most cases only the upper half needs trimming. On rare occasions the lower half may need a little reshaping, especially if a too-long upper half pushes the lower half in the opposite direction.

When the upper and lower halves grow in opposite directions, the beak may be trimmed to let the bird peck properly. But in most cases a crossed beak is a
genetic defect, and such a chicken should not be used for breeding. You will know it’s genetic if the crossed beak appears almost from the time a chick hatches and keeps growing crossed no matter how often you trim.

The top half of a chicken’s beak that grows longer than the bottom half (left) must be trimmed (middle) so the chicken can eat properly; crossed beak (right) is a genetic deformity.

Beak trimming is not the same as debeaking — although the commercial industry now euphemistically calls debeaking “beak trimming” or “beak conditioning” — which is cutting a beak so it remains permanently short to prevent cannibalism. Birds in a properly managed backyard flock should not need permanent debeaking.