Cleaning the Chicken Coop: five minutes a day, keeps the smell away

Hi Guys and Girls! People tend to believe that chickens and chicken coops smell. I think this must be based on the experience that when people go near a chicken coop in a village or somewhere, it really does smell due to lack of maintenance. As a result of this, people may think that keeping chickens in a small backyard is not a good idea and perhaps not polite toward the neighbors.

Guess what! Chickens actually are one of the least smelly of creatures if you do your own part. Having kept a dog and a rabbit, I can definitely say that chickens' manure smells way less than then theirs.

Okay, so what do we need to do to have a chicken coop that does not smell and easy to maintain. I would say there are three important things:

1. Do not overcrowd your coop -- keep fewer chickens
2. Make all part of your chicken coop easily accessible
3. Spend 5 minutes a day to clean up that day's litter

In this post, I would like to focus on the third item and show how easy it is to clean my coop. First, let's have a look at how it looks from the outside:

It has been pretty cold recently and there is snow on the ground. The top cover of my coop can be entirely taken off for easy access:

You can see that there 3 eggs in the basket and there is some manure from the last night. This is the manure of 4 chickens for 1 night (they do not spend time inside during the day). Let's take a closer look and see the items I use for cleanup. You can see in the picture below that I use a bucket, a scraper, and a mason's trowel:

I simply scrape the litter from the surface using the scraper and the trowel and dump it inside the bucket. Once you accumulate a few day's of manure, you can then dump this bucket into a compost pile if you have one (if you do that make sure to also add brown matter such as dry leaves, straw, etc. to prevent smell due to excess nitrogen in the pile). Otherwise, you can discard it in any sanitary way you like. Anyways, the cleaned coop looks much better:

Note that it is a good idea to add some soft material inside the egg basket. I use wood shavings cheaply obtained from a local carpenter:

We can now close the cover of the coop and get on with our day:

How much time did this process take? Really not more than 5 minutes. So with 5 minutes a day you can keep your chicken coop in pristine condition. Note that I haven't cleaned up the run area underneath. This part also needs to be cleaned from time to time but much less frequently than the inside area. I usually add a lot of brown matter to the run area in the form of dry leaves, wood shavings, etc. as well as kitchen scraps that this part almost turns into compost on its own. A couple of times a year I clean this part with a rake and dump the contents into a compost pile. So that's all for this short post: five minutes a day, keeps the smell away!