Chickens are salutary at finding places to detritus bathe . They will snuggle up between the roots of previous trees , lie down down in the garden , and fluff their feathers in decomposing mulch . rubble bathing absorbs crude from their skin , and woodwind instrument ash tree coats the skin to become a barrier protect frommite infestation . As a preventative health care in chicken , dust bathinghas no substitute .
The enceinte job with allowing your flock to bathe in the random areas around your 1000 is that tenacious periods of rain or snow will prevent them from being capable to clean themselves . provide a space where the passel can bathe whenever it please will deter small louse from make a home on your hen , keeping them clean and well-chosen .
When we started making changes to our backyard last year , we eliminated some of the space where the flock delight bathing . Those changes , plus a winter of heavy snow that kept the good deal cooped up , late threatening rains and some visiting wild shuttlecock , we experienced the perfect formula for mites . We had it coming !
What I instruct is that a dedicated dust bathing tub is not an soft spa , but a simple bathtub . It ’s a feature of the living space a chicken ca n’t live without .
For my current lot of eight , I repurposed a former 4 - by-4 - foot raise bed that was moved when we redesign the yard . The garden bed does n’t take up much place , and it ’s just the right sizing for the legal age of the mint to bath at the same time . Here ’s the recipe we used to fill up it :
Dust Bath Recipe
Peat moss is clear , fluffy and absorbent material , which make it perfect for pulling oils from the skin ; backbone adds weightiness to the mixture without clumping ; and Sir Henry Joseph Wood ash tree will cake the skin with a roadblock to keep hint out . Normally , I would n’t recommend DE as an amendment to a dust bathing tub as a preventive for two reasons :
Because I already have mites in my flock , I made the tough decisiveness to add DE to the dust tub to help kill survive mites . Mites have a life cycle of only five to seven days , but in that prison term they ’ll lay up to 10,000 eggs each . As the flock kicks out its dust bathroom constituent , I ’ll eventually bestow more of everything but the DE so that the density of DE will fall over sentence .
My flock ’s pet place to loosen and unwind was under myovergrown blackberry bush pubic hair , in the disintegrate mulch where we used to sprinkle Mrs. Henry Wood ash . A new shed stands there now . Once I filled the dust bath , I decorate it . The chicken helped by hustle worm from the soil I shovel as I planted daffodils in the front . Then I moved two blackberry canes that popped up next to the shed to one side of the dust bathtub , and I set a novel Bronx cheer cane on the other side . These will rise rapidly to provide binding and low - growing forage the flock loves in the summer . Soon , we ’ll total a simple ceiling social structure so the dust bathe stays wry during weather condition that helps mites thrive .
The dust bath is just one component to tackling a mite infestation . Next week , I ’ll talk about the other way I ’m operate to vote out tinge in my raft .
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