Chicken Bedding...Shavings vs Straw

Ok, as I have said I am new to this whole chicken thing. At the moment we are using pine shavings for bedding. I would love some input on shavings vs straw. How do they compare for warmth, parasite control and general chicken happiness. I want my girls to be HAPPY. I would think the straw would compost better?

IMO- as soon as we stopped using straw and changed over to the Kentucky bagged shavings - we haven't had a bug and our birds are in way better condition. We show our birds so this is a huge plus!

I use deep litter which is a foot or so of compost topped with something dry and warm. If the chickens are turning things over I never touch it except to top it off with more bedding. Sometimes before topping I will go in with a fork and churn it up. I am thinking that Cynthia's Mantis may be good for this.

I will top it with peat, which neutralizes odor, and then something dry and warm. For me that would be wheat straw because it is cheapest and it keeps the chickens busy turning it over and looking for seeds and insects.

My Chickens get bored with straw, and I'm still pulling layers of straw out from this winter. Our crappy, snow drift filled winter exposed and created a whole new set of gaps and windows, then the melt off soaked, absolutely sooooaked the bedding. The straw is STILL not dry. I've been at it with a pitchfork daily, pulling it all out and throwing the old, wet bedding out into the chicken yard to dry, get scratched and blow off.

Under those layers are layers of alfalfa (still green, lol), pine bedding, and rich, alread-composted dirt, and it's all dry. I will avoid straw again unless its been through a chipper and is really fine. My chickens scratch through it for 2 or 3 days and then just stop scratching. With the shavings, mind you, they dig all the way down to the dirt floor to roll and fluff themselves, and they churn it really well.

I strongly, STRONGLY considered sanding the coop, but I'm going to give this method another go for another winter and get some poop-boards made up to see if it helps (at the suggestion of the lovely people here). Before winter hits, we ought to have that roof repaired anyway, or at least patched. I do throw DE down regularly in the coop, the girls go crazy rolling in it, so I try to do it often.

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I use cedar shavings.

I do not use the deep litter method as my hen house has a wood floor and I keep it shovelled out.

There is an edge board, about 4 inches tall, under the outside edge roost, on the floor. Think of a sandbox, only this has poop in it. Since most of the pooping happens when chickens are roosting, most of the poop lands in and stays in this poo pit. I shovel out this pit when it gets icky. I only shovel out the entire hen house once a year.

When I do shovel, I scrape out the poopy bedding under the roost, which is kept there by the edge board. Then I scrape up the somewhat dirty, but still dry bedding off the rest of the floor and toss that into the shovelled out poo pit. Then I add fresh bedding to the main floor area. This way my bedding gets used twice before it gets piled. Once on main floor, once under roost in poo pit, then out into compost pile. Squeeze the mileage out of that bedding!

From the moment they hatch and for the rest of their lives, my birds are on cedar. They eat it. They have never died from it, and it does not keep you free of mites and lice as some will claim. The volatile oils in a cedar shaving evaporate out fairly quickly. But it does take quite a while to compost. Having used both hay and straw as bedding, I will never go back to it. You need a FORK to get rid of straw, but shavings, no matter how mucky and gross, can be moved with a shovel.

Uno, does it smell lovely for a long time?

I use cedar/pine shaving mux as well, and only remove it twice per year. And it does smell nice for a lonnnnng time.

I don't have any chicken-specific bedding advice, but from 20 years or so of general livestock keeping advice, I can say that I would much rather clean out shavings than straw. Straw is a pain in the arse.

We do use straw for the cows, but we blow it into the sheds with a bale processor, and when it comes to cleaning time, we have equipment for that, too.

Anything that has to be cleaned out with manual labour, I would much rather use shavings for.

Sue, I don't notice the smell for very long. Other people say they can smell the cedar but I think I'm used to it, so don't notice it much after a day or two.

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Oh don't you worry Higgins, I earn my booberry pie! Humping loads of horse poo UPHILL every day earns me my pie. Which I eat by way of a teeny, tiny, battery operated backhoe that runs on the kitchen table, and shovels that pie right into my waiting face! Mouth open, insert pie! And coffee! Herbal tea be damned!

As to bedding, I guess it's what you have access to and room to store. I don't know where I would get oat straw, and have nowhere to store bales of it if I did find it. Shavings come readily from the mill where HUb works, in heavy duty garbage bags it can be piled anywhere and survives the weather just fine. In winter, push off the snow and lug a bag into the hen house. AND THEN HAVE PIE!

HigginsRAT wrote:AuthenticFarm never ever serves PIE because she don't work it off...she serves TEA...Herbal TEA (with no honey buns/no pasty buns!) and never any coffee.

This is extra funny to me because I am well known for my pie - I host "pie club" and make a hundred or so apple pies every late August/early September to share with friends - and also for being addicted to coffee.

HigginsRAT wrote:Well harumph...after "forking" out the straw, I also earn the right to that EXTRA slice of booberry pie. That I also eat with a FORK (but not the same ones).
NO pie for you either FATTY FATTY 2x4! Harumph...and I suppose you have the gym membership to prove it!
Rumour has it that Uno eats HER pie with a shovel shaped spoon and sure she's strong (but cedar smell ain't all it's cracked up to be...I lived on the Coast for 25+ years--I know what red cedar smells like!) ...and AuthenticFarm never ever serves PIE because she don't work it off...she serves TEA...Herbal TEA (with no honey buns/no pasty buns!) and never any coffee.
Harrumph...I'm so outnumbered with my oat straw, I'm going to go cut a two slice sized piece of pie and eat it with my bare duck gooey hands!
So there <<grumble grumble grumble>>, only got the strength left in me to pick at the last two posters mostly...I am so gonna go roll in my oat straw and sulk !
Tara

Wow, a whole lotta harumphin' goin' on this morning, Tara, harumph. I love that word and I love how it exactly depicts someone standing there having a hissy fit with the hands on the hips, love it. I like to harumph too, makes good points. I am smiling and I am teasing.

My chicken coops all have earthen floors. For the most part, I would consider out area we live in now, dry. Back on the coast where we lived for almost all our lives (been here 3 years, coming up June 16), how to bed the coops was a whole different story.

This is an old subject, Echo, you should do a search and see if you can find some posts, lots of discussion, but so worthy to begin the discussion again.

Right, where was I? Yes, bedding for the coops. Earthen floors, the nest boxes have copious amounts of straw. If I had oat straw around, I would use oat straw, but haven’t looked for it, too lazy I guess, kind of a low priority, should look for some, by the way. One day. The chickens roost on roosts that are three levels high. The lowest being about 2 feet. I have large, heavy fowl breed birds and they need a lower roost. Big bodies jumping down from high places is just not good, I think, can be damaging to legs. The chickens jump from rail to rail (2 X 4s on the wide side they roost on) to get to the top. Chickens like the top. There is enough room between each rail so that if someone is on the second rail down, the butt does not come near to the head or body of the bird on the lower perch. Ensured that. That would be a horrid mess if the butts pooped poop on someones back or head. That was important too. I find most birds like to be on the top rung. That is where most of the poop falls. I also find chickens like to poop at night most, hee, hee. So below that top third rung is the poop area. Lots of that stuff. I clean that out two times a year, along with the entire area of the coops.

So, for bedding. Yes, my preference is two things, mixed with another thing. The main ingredient is shavings. I know the shavings you are talking about Tara, that can have sharp shavings in them, I would call this type of shavings more of a bark mulch. I know it, have bought it, do not like it, lots of sharp pieces of wood for surely. I get the softwood shavings, the big bale of it, big as a block, but weighs only about 20 pounds. It is soft, with not one single hard or piece that could cause harm. I think that they might be mostly like pine, but not sure, never paid attention. Once I got some shavings from a mill. They were horrible, they were more like wood shaved pieces and I put some down and then burned the rest, I did not like it and did not use it, I thought it would hurt the birds. I also use rice hulls. Oldest Daughter had got 10 big bales of it, 50 pound bales, from a fund raiser she had participated in. These were imported from California, don’t know if we can get them here. Think it was $15 a bag, but worth every penny. Still have 2 left. I put half a bale of shavings in each coop and then about half a bale of rice hulls in each coop. I let the chickens move that around. Throughout the year I will get peat moss and I will take copious amounts and put hunks of that in each coop. The chickens move that around too. I clean the nest boxes now and then. When I add more straw, I take that old straw and throw it on the poopy piles below the roosts. At that time I also take the mixture of rice hulls, shavings and peat, which has been marvellously churned together and all mixed up so pretty even and throw a few handfuls to cover the poop piles below the roosts. So I would say that during the course of 6 months, those poop piles below the roosts have about 6 layers of poop and then the debris from the common area of hanging out in the coop. Powerful stuff to work this way. My chicken houses do not have any scent of bad in them. I always smell deeply each time I go in, and I have to say, smells pretty good in there. I would say I use about one small, not the big bale, of peat divided among each coop every month or so. I only add the shavings and rice hulls at the time that I clean out the coop, so twice a year. I think too much peat is not good, as it can be dusty, so not that much, but some. I think peat is very, very important in a coop to help to keep smell down. Low pH, good stuff.

Most times when I am putting new straw in the nest boxes, lots falls on the floor, that is cool and that is fine. But I would not layer my coop in straw. Haven’t tried that up here in the Okanagan, but on the coast it was horrid, layers of horrid wet, stinky, ich....

When I have mammas raising babies, that bedding for the babies and her is straw. The hens live in a particular spot, two little areas side by side, for two broodies at a time. The ones in the common area have dog exercise fences that keep them safe and sound for a couple of weeks until little ones get their sea legs and are strong as get out. To me it is imperative that these little ones have about 8 inches to a foot of straw to get going on living in. Of course mammas always make a hole deep in the bedding and the earthen floor with stuff on it is exposed, doesn’t matter. The point is to mostly keep the babies from eating stuff that they should not. They don’t like to eat straw. Think that is my main reason. Always worried that the little ones might eat too much stuff that looks like food from the floors, straw hides this for some time, smiling. Just my way, nothing that is set in stone anywhere, just what I like to do. When mamma brings the babies out of their brooding area (about 10 days old), I let the chickens go into that part and they do an excellent job of moving around straw. So thinking about it, during the broody season, there is actually a fair amount of straw all mixed in with the peat, shavings and rice hulls too. Lots of stuff everywhere.

So many methods that people like to use and bedding, but that is what I am up to with my chickens. Have an awesome day, CynthiaM.

I have found a new type of bedding that works great. It is 60%60%a more absorbent than shavings and 100% more absorbent than straw, its Flax bedding.

progers wrote:I have found a new type of bedding that works great. It is 60%60%a more absorbent than shavings and 100% more absorbent than straw, its Flax bedding.

Is it made from the seed or the stem? I have been trying to get hold of some small bales of flax straw for years!

I've also heard this, and there's flax farms around... hmm

Flax straw sounds interesting...

For bedding I use wheat straw due to availability and low cost. I find it works pretty good in general, though annual coop clean out can be a real work out if the litter is deep and compacted. I've recently started adding peat into the mix as well. It was kinda dusty at first, but the chickens sure seem to like it.

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HigginsRAT wrote:
I believe you have mentioned your famous pie on this forum. The pie club; is it wooden or metal...how badly are the people beaten before they submit to eating the pies you so graciously provide? Be careful at my house...if you ask for a "lump," do realize I need to know before hand that it is for your beverage and not yer head!

A 100 or so apple pies...yes, yes...good show...are we yet considered friends? Oh do friend us...might not be BOOberry pie, but snapple pies are really grand heated with great gobs of vanilla ice cream...served on a plate with a fork...not a bowl with a spoon (as my spouse says all pies are to be served) or on a platter with a bucket or a shovel! Yes, do friend us, we are dying of starvation for you to FRIEND US.

You have Chanteclers, so I think we should be friends. Will you trade Chanteclers for pies?

I find that my heavy wooden rolling pin doubles nicely as a club.

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Funny you guys mentioned the flax, as someone recently posted this in the Lloydminster Area Livestock & Feed facebook group.



Those are all Vermilion & Lloydminster area phone numbers on the image, but there's also an e-mail address. Maybe they could hook you up with someone local.

HigginsRAT wrote:Oh yes, sounds mighty fine but will you still be making pies in 3 to 5 years time (pending which size and variety you prefer in the Canuck Bocks!)? Bribery with pies might tip the apple cart if it allows someone to jump the established que on Chants here!

There's a queue? Pssssshhhhhht. I don't do queue! I shall charge to the front with my pies and coffee and homemade honey vodka!

Thanks for posting that is the company I get mine from, my contact is Kim. The bedding is made from the stem.