Straw For The Chickens

With this Avian Flu lockdown we've been having it's been tricky to keep the chickens clean with their much reduced pens sizes.

I've been using my wood shavings from my carpentry, but I only produce so many and they do soak in far too easily with all this wet weather we've been having. 

So I put in a message to a farming friend to see if he would be happy to sell me a few bales of straw.

 

He only had big bales, but luckily I managed to get him to deliver it and sheet it up until we could use it. 

Then I didn't want to use it all at one time. So I hammered a pin through it to be able to retie the string in the middle. 

Luckily this worked really well and I could straw down all 8 poultry pens!

 So lots of happy chickens and ducks after my little trip round all the pens. I think straw wins out when it's really wet like this as it forms a mat that the animals can stand on. I'm almost looking forward to putting all this on the compost heap when the lockdown for the birds ends!

What have you been using to try and keep your birds dry this winter? Or what would you use if you had the choice?