I talked about deep bedding very briefly in an earlier post, Temporary Barn Idea. For this post, I’m going to go into more detail about it.
Deep bedding is, simply put, the continual addition of new bedding on top of old, soiled bedding to create a raised area that provides warmth and keeps animals out of the mud. The bedding can be anything from hay, straw, shavings, or wood chips. I even used shredded paper one year. (I may have gotten a new paper shredder and went a little crazy with the shredding – note to self: don’t shred school reports if they haven’t been turned in and graded yet!)
The big factor with doing deep bedding well is to keep adding enough bedding that it stays dry. If the animals are walking around in poopy muck up to their ankles, that is not proper deep bedding and completely goes against the entire point of it. This is to give their hooves a break from the wetness that comes with winters and early springs and provide the animals with a comfortable place to rest. With all that spongy bedding packed on top of itself makes for a nice mattress. I once caught my husband taking a nap on the deep bedding with the cattle!
It also provides a warmth, which is a big help during the frigid days during the dead of winter. As the earlier layers of bedding start their decomposition process, a warmth is created. This warms the entire bedded area and keeps the animals in a comfortable state when the temperatures drop below freezing.
As far as what surface you can use deep bedding on, wood floors are the only one that I know of that would not work. We tried an experiment this current winter with deep bedding the chickens’ tractor cart. With enough people warning, either from the Farmer’s Almanac or other sources, that this was going to be a colder than normal January, we were trying to figure out what to do about the chickens once the temperatures got down toward zero. I refused to let them into the garage again! Those chickens ate all of my potted plants!
The final decision was to set their cart in a lean-to, place a large, thick, cardboard box over the chicken’s wire floor, and start adding deep bedding on top of that. Not the flimsy hexagon styled chicken wire/netting, the strong, rectangular, welded wire.
It worked so well that Mr. Rooster thought he would sleep on top of the cart when it went down to negative ten degrees! My husband had to chase him to get him to go into the cart. You’d think Mr. Rooster wouldn’t mind spending the night with thirty chatty hens.
Getting pictures for this post was quite interesting, though.