All Mucked Out!

The coop, that is. Today I performed the biannual mucking out of my chicken coop. It took about 4 hours with a few breaks to relieve my nose of the stench. Technically, the deep litter method of keeping chickens is supposed to prevent the stench but I had too many chickens over the winter and their droppings overwhelmed the floor. It did not help having the 3 remaining ducks in there with them but it was the only way to still be sure I had live ducks this year.

I shall mitigate this problem soon. Hal will be lopping off the heads of half of my chickens and also half the guineas. We will be moving the ducks into their own pen as soon as we get a fence built around it. Otherwise I may want to muck out the coop a little more often to prevent such back breaking work.

Of course, tomorrow I still have to take all the muck away. It's sitting in a large pile outside the coop. I still need to charge the lawn tractor battery, hook up the small trailer and fork the chicken droppings into the trailer then dump it on the compost pile at the bottom of the driveway, downwind from the house. That should be fun.

At least the birds are enjoying the day. They got to free range while I was cleaning their house. But now for me, a nice trip to the hot tub will do nicely.