Author: Anna & Mark

I bought a cheap meat
thermometer
in Wal-Mart the other day because I figured it would double as a soil
thermometer to see how much heat our deep bedding
puts off.  First, I stuck the thermometer down into the
snow-covered soil amid the winter
wheat.  It
looks like the soil there is around 27 degrees
Fahrenheit.



The ground underneath
our chicken coop is on a bit of a slant, so all
of the leaves tend to get kicked to the downhill
end.  Luckily, the roosts are on the downhill end too, so leaves
and poop compact there into deep bedding.  On the upper end of the
coop is a perfect control area — it’s just as close to our heated
chicken waterer as the deep bedding area and takes in any warmth
the chickens give off, so I figure the soil there is about the
temperature the soil in the whole coop would naturally be without deep
bedding.  My soil thermometer suggests that the
coop’s protection raises the soil temperature only marginally, to about
32 degrees Fahrenheit.



Finally, I tested out
the deep bedding area — 58 degrees
Fahrenheit!  No wonder our tender-footed hens prefer to spend
their days inside when the snow flies!  I wouldn’t mind if our own
floor was a constant 58 degrees.



Our spoiled cat rolled
his eyes when I told him how contented our hens
were.  In his seat by the fire, temperatures are more like 80 and
he says he wouldn’t have it any other way.

I
snagged this photo from Gene
Logsdon’s blog,
where he was talking about a pile of hay that he accidentally left in
his shed rather than forking it into the hay loft.  He wrote: “The
chickens loved to scratch merrily away in the hay, eating green
bits of clover leaves and grass seeds out of it. With the ground frozen
and covered with snow, they can’t forage in the woods, so they are
supplementing the whole wheat and corn I feed them by eating the
haystack.”



I’ve been
giving our chickens autumn leaves and straw as bedding, but now that Logsdon
mentions it, I can see how hay would be a better choice.  The
chickens would have more to pick at when the snow covers their usual
stomping grounds, and around here hay is cheaper to come by than straw
(even though the latter is a waste product elsewhere.)  More than
ever, this makes me think that I need to learn to use a scythe so that
I can make hay myself on a small scale.