How to Make an Easy Dust Box for Chickens

There were two things that kept me away from keeping poultry for years: poop and parasites. I've had at least one child in diapers since the early '00s so I really didn't want to add yet more poop management to my daily duties. Thankfully, I found out about using deep litter in my chicken coop and it really minimizes the amount of work with manure.

That still leaves the parasite part, though. Chickens are prone to getting several varieties of lice and mites, as well as intestinal worms.

I don't do bugs. At all. To give you a sense of the depth of my phobia, my parents tease me about the time when I was a little girl and I cried when a butterfly came too near me. I still don't like butterflies.

I didn't make the jump into chicken keeping until I was able to resign myself to the fact that a) I would probably see bugs on them and b) I would have to do something about it.

Chickens naturally take dust baths as a way to get rid of external parasites. They throw themselves down in a dusty spot and roll around until they get dirt in all their nooks and crannies. Dust baths are very effective but even so, chickens can suffer from lice and mites. But then I learned a way to soup up my chickens' dust baths by providing them with a box filled with pest repellent materials. Here's how I did it.

I sent Hubby Dear to a big box pet store to buy the biggest litter box he could find. He certainly delivered.

A king-sized litter box fit for a 39 lb cat

This "jumbo" litter box is 34.5" x 19.5" x 10". Two chickens could bathe in here at the same time. The depth is the most critical dimension. You want all your bathing materials to stay in the box when the chickens do their thing. (Ever watched a chicken dust bathe? They can go kinda crazy.) 

Adding the first layer of peat moss 

You can fill your dust box with any number of materials. Harvey Ussery recommends peat moss, dried and sifted clay, and/or small amounts of wood ash.  I used peat moss (I always have some handy) plus some sand I had left over from another project. 

Food-grade DE. Do NOT use any other type of DE with your poultry. 

Now for the good stuff. You can add garden lime, food-grade diatomaceous earth (DE), or elemental sulfur powder to really sock it to those parasites. Remember to wear a good dust mask whenever you work with DE. It is really fine and you'll breathe it in and irritate your lungs. 

I should mention that Gail Damerow, author of Storey's Guide to Raising Chickens, doesn't think you should use DE in dust boxes for parasite prevention. Chickens can be prone to respiratory problems and breathing in DE is not a good thing for anyone. Damerow thinks you should only use DE and other heavy-hitting anti-parasite products when there is an obvious infestation. Harvey Ussery, on the other hand, routinely uses a small amount of DE in his dust box. I decided to go Ussery's route and use DE as part of my dust box mix. 

I also mix a little DE in with my chickens' feed. Some people claim that feeding DE to poultry will serve as a natural dewormer. Gale Damerow has a negative opinion of that as well. She says that DE only works to kill worms, etc. when it is dry. Once it has made its way through the chicken's digestive tract, it is not dry and no longer has any of the microscopic cutting edges that serve to kill the bad guys. I still do it on the off chance that it will work!   

Peat, sand, and DE, ready to be mixed

After I mixed it all together, the dust box had about 5 inches of material inside it. I laboriously dragged the heavy and awkward box outside and placed it in a sunny part of the chickens' run. 

All done

After my chickens began spending more of their time outdoors instead of "cooped up", I went ahead and moved the dust box up into their coop. The behemoth does take up quite a bit of floor space, but that's not as much of a big deal now they are outside from dawn until dusk. The important thing is that the dust bath will remain dry so the chickens can bathe to their hearts' content no matter the weather.  

References: 

1.The Small-Scale Poultry Flock: An All-Natural Approach to Raising Chickens and Other Fowl for Home and Market Growers by Harvey Ussery
2. Storey's Guide to Raising Chickens, 3rd Edition by Gail Damerow


Calling all poultry owners! Do you provide a dust box for your chickens? Do you use DE on a routine basis?

April 2012 in Review

Another month went by at the speed of light. Whew! I hope you all had as productive an April as I did.

Hubby Dear and I spent a lot of time out in the garden. We are finally making great strides on our homestead and it feels awesome. Namely, we have an orchard in the ground instead of just dreams of one.

Mint and Sage blossoms in the herb garden

The first radishes of the year were ready to be eaten.

"Purple Plum" radish

This is just a tiny percentage of the radishes we have eaten and of what is still growing in the garden.

Noodles the Silver Lakenvelder somehow made it into the garden.
She's kind of a spazz.  

The occasional chicken escapee didn't harm anything.

Garden on April 29

Raindrops on "Sugar Sprint" Pod Pea blossoms

We've already enjoyed salads from both the "Encore" salad mix and "Corvair" spinach

I'm excited to report that our Swiss Chard is actually growing!
It is growing slowly, but a marked improvement over last year. 

"Chester" blackberries in full bloom. 

One of our new "Heritage" raspberry canes

We're doing our best to keep the weeds back from our new raspberry plantings. It's hard to keep up on this, but it's really important. When the new sprouts emerge and grow tall, we'll be able to mulch, but until then, we've got to do it by hand. If the weeds get ahead, they will choke out the baby raspberries. I found that out last year!

Apple trees 

Our newly planted apple trees have leafed out and look great.

"Bluecrop", "Blueray", and "Earliblue" blueberry bushes

One of the big tasks we completed this month was to plant our blueberries. A longer post about the blueberries will be coming soon, I hope. I'm spending so much time outdoors that I don't get the computer time I used to.

We mulched and mulched and mulched everything we can get our hands on. That's another post I haven't gotten around to.

How I spent my prepping budget this month:

I know there are people who raise chickens on a budget, but I am not one of those people. I keep learning about things that would make my life easier or more convenient. Then I buy them and use up all  my prepping budget. It is going to take a looooong time before we break even on all our chicken expenses.

Storage for chicken feed

We are storing our chicken feed in metal trash cans. They are supposedly water-tight, but I found that after a heavy rain that the feed inside was damp in places. Not good! I shopped around and found this Rubbermaid storage shed that fits both of my feed cans with room for a few extras.

One can is for feed, the other for bags of scratch,
DE, grit, etc. 

I have been fighting a losing battle trying to keep pine shavings out of the chickens' food, water, and grit. It is better now that they spend most of their days outside, but I think the money I spent on an easy maintenance feeder, waterer, and grit dispenser is worth it.

New feeder, grit dispenser, and waterer

I also got a rake for maintaining the litter in the coop. We are using the deep litter method of manure management. All I have to do is keep adding litter and turn it occasionally to make sure it doesn't get moist or compacted in areas. Believe it or not, my coop doesn't smell at all and I'll only have to clean it out a couple times a year.

My last chicken-related prepping purchase was to make a dust bath. That's another post for the future. (Man, I am behind, aren't I?)

After all that, I didn't have much budget left. I did buy a can of freeze dried chicken and a Katadyn Hiker Water Microfilteras part of our bug out bag upgrade.


Gratuitous Chicken Pics

I can't have a post that summarizes April without including photos of our backyard inhabitants. The chickens have learned a lot this month. They now wait eagerly for the automatic chicken door to open in the morning. They've learned the layout of the chicken moat and most of them can figure out how to navigate back to the coop without getting lost. Most importantly, they now put themselves to bed as night falls. It was getting old crawling army-style through chicken poop to try and catch those little buggers under the coop every evening.

I love having a mixed flock. Aren't they pretty?

Exploring the moat

Our rooster, Doofenshmirtz

And that's our April! What did you accomplish this month?