What is the best material for chicken house bedding? A very common question.

We recommend a product called easibed for chicken house bedding as it is super asorbant, smells nice and chickens love to turn it over. It is clean and free from dust and light making house cleaning so easy.

I will add a link as requested Chicken Bedding but before you fly to my shop, please think do you have a local horse or farm feed supplier, see if they sell it first, it will save post - only this item, buy everything else from us please :), if you do use this link however it will tell you more about the product you may find useful.

Straw really is horrid to use, it can be infested with lice and mites, it is not asorbant and it is a real ‘bugger’ to clean plus it stinks fast.

Of course we make money selling red mite sprays and powders but we prefer healthy chickens for our customers. Red Mite will live and breed under felt and you will never be able to kill them off, you will spend £10’s to £100’s on treatments that will never kill the safe eggs under the felt on the roof. Please save yourself money and hassle and stay away from chicken houses with felt roofs. It really is not worth it.

If you have a chicken house with felt on the roof and are struggling with red mite, please please get rid of the felt, mite will live under there and you can not get to them. If you have felt roofing strip it off and try a product called onduline similar to corragated sheeting. Now assuming you dont have a felt roof, we recommend using a red mite powder in the nooks and cracks and around the perches each time you clean the poultry house. This is normally a natural product, ours is diatom earth, which cuts the cuticle of the mite as it walks over it and then it dies of dehydration. If you have a big outbreak it is too far gone for this product and you will need to spray the chicken coop with mite kill spray (Not with chickens in it) this will kill all mite there at the time, you must do again in 3-5 days to kill all the young that have hatched since the first spray. After this please revert to using the powder.  

Hi, we offer 2 poultry houses I would advise. We offer the silkie chicken house or the sussex poultry house these are also our most popular chicken houses. Although there is little price differnce the sussex chicken house is the newer design and with the wider poultry house we find that chicken health and egg numbers are up in the bigger of the two poultry houses. Please remember if your chicken numbers are low that in all poultry housing ensure the bedding is kept to an inch or inch and a half in very cold weather to avoid birds dying. So to answer the question I would suggest the Sussex chicken house as the bird benifits are much better. 

There are many things to consider but the first 2 things for long term success don’t buy a chicken house with a felt roof as red mite could become a major problem, you will not be able to control the red mite if they breed under the felt. The next consideration is cleaning of your poultry house, if cleaning the house is easy then you will find after 6 months you will still be cleaning the chicken house on a regular basis if the house is difficult to clean then it is too easy to delay cleaning which is not good for the birds.

So when looking for poultry houses ensure you do not buy felt roof models, they are many other options of wooden roofs or onduline (corrugated) roofs which are ideal for the birds.

On cleaning the more access you get in chicken houses the easier they are to clean. Personally I find lift up roofs very hard to clean, leaning in and trying to clean could be very hard, not to mention the roof could be blown off and broken if you get a gusty day - this is more common than you might think. Slide out floors sound great but if bedding is uneven then they don’t slide out and especially if they get wet and swell they really don’t open at all. Full size doors are good but that would be a very big chicken house indeed for full access so this is unlikely for most. Our houses have completely removable sides so you get 100% access to the floor area and cleaning is quick.

Ventilation in chicken houses is also vital to ensure ammonia smells do not damage the birds but ventilation should be in the top of the house and not directly in the faces of the birds or this will also cause health problems.

Perches are also vital in a house, normally 30cm of perch per bird would be fine. Please ensure perches have nice comfortable edges to ensure they dont damage the feet on the birds. Also I would suggest perches are not above 12-15″ off the ground.

Ensure the house is wide enough for the birds to get onto the perches, some houses are too narrow and the birds can not get on to the perches (we have also suffered from this in the past).

Ideally the entry pop hole for the chickens should be lockable at night time as Mr foxy is learning how to lift the sliding pop holes and we are getting many distressed calls due to Mr foxy.

Nest boxes, ideally these should be quite deep for the birds and in a nice dark place in the house. If they could be opened from outside this would be much easier for egg collection and again should have the option to be locked and predators will enter the house in any weak areas.

I have been asked again what should I use for ground cover in a fixed chicken run, to be honest I hate fixed chicken runs as diseases and worms can build up here, movable runs are so much better but of course we are not all so lucky. So in this situation I would suggest small chipped bark to about 1″ deep, deeper if you can. If the peices are too large the chickens can not dig it about and it will become caked with droppings very quickly and will need to be changed very often. Ideally on a 10′ x 6′ run with 6 chickens I would suggest changing every 3-4 weeks if the run is covered but if it is rained on then this will give a life of 4-12 weeks. If it smells dont delay change it. Please dont forget in a fixed run you must worm your birds on a very regular basis.