I Love the Smell of Ammonia in the Morning

Chickens are easy to raise; all they do is eat, squawk, lay eggs and poop (and poop and poop and poop).  I muck out the chicken coop once a week.  If I leave it any longer than that, the ammonia smell (from the chicken poop) becomes so noxious it gets difficult to breathe inside the coop.  The coop stays cleaner in the summer when the chickens spend the majority of their time outside and the coop windows always stay open; but, in the winter, when they are literally cooped up inside a closed up coop, it gets very dirty and very smelly, very quickly.

Yes, this is poop encrusted straw.

Cleaning the coop is not rocket science; however, it does require the right tools, heaps of patience and some manual labour.  The first step is to move the feeder and water bucket outside and to shoo out as many chickens and ducks from inside the coop as possible.  It is sometimes possible to bait the chickens outside with scratch but the "shoo-ing" is admittedly much easier in the summer.  In the winter, the chickens don't want to go out in the cold (even when tempted with treats) and so they stay inside the coop and get in the way of the coop cleaner as much as they possibly can.  On more than one occasion I have had a chicken stand on my shovel and refuse to move.  They are crazy birds.  This is where the patience comes in.

Some chickens were tempted outside with treats.

The rest of the chickens stayed inside to get in my way.

Coop cleaning requires three main tools: a flat bottomed shovel, a pitch fork and a floor scraper.  The mechanics of coop cleaning are: use the scraper to loosen the straw and poop off the floor, shovel the dirty straw and poop out the little back door into the chicken run, use the pitch fork to load the nastiness into the wheel barrow, push/pull/drag the full wheel barrow out to the manure pile, dump and repeat.  While undertaking these tasks a good coop cleaner must also avoid: 1) whacking any interfering chickens with the shovel (Note 1: much patience is required to avoid intentional whacking.  Note 2: accidental whacking sometimes happens and is par for the course); and 2) getting bitten by Leah the duck when you are not paying attention (easier said than done).

Scrape and shovel.  Avoid chickens.

Load 'em up!

Full to the brim.

When there is snow it is easier to drag the full
wheel barrow behind you out to the manure pile
then push it.

Once the coop is cleared out, you can spread new, clean straw out on the floor (the chickens will help you spread it out evenly) and then replace the feeder (after filling it up) and water dish (after washing it, of course).

Ta-da! - a clean chicken coop.  That gives you one more week until the smell of ammonia threatens to knock your socks off and the whole process must begin again.