Our chickens live in a small coop attached to a medium-sized run that opens onto a large-ish fenced yard.

Our driveway is about 100 meters of maintenance, requiring both traction and gumption to navigate in the winter.

The driveway and chickens may seem unrelated, but our chickens do lend a hand with helping maintain winter driveway access. Do they go out in little hi-vis vests and scrape away the snow? No… Though that would be adorable.

But the chickens do have sand lining their run, which they donate to the cause.

We try to use consumables like sand not once, but twice or thrice or frice or more.

A few times a year we do a big reset of the chicken run, and that includes pulling out and replacing all the bedding. The bedding sits on top of a layer of sand, on top of the run’s plywood floor. One of the things we’ve been trying lately is sifting the bedding through a screen to extract the dry sand back out, and then bagging it up to use again in the winter.

Because in the winter, we spread sand on our gravel driveway. It goes in a homebrew traction mix, together with shavings, and wood ash from the fire.

It’s all part of how we try to keep the driveway clear without using salt. Because on either side of our driveway are lush cedars. Visited by waxwings and screech owls. Because not far away runs a creek that’s home to turtles, snakes, stately herons, and awkward baby geese. And underneath the gravel, out of sight, but never entirely out of mind, is the groundwater we and our neighbours drink from. Anything I spread on the ground, eventually, makes its way back to the roots and water below. So I’m not keen to salt the earth.

(Salt is no magic bullet anyways. I’ve seen it absolutely slathered on driveways that still remain impassable, the pickup trucks stuck at the road like shiny beached whales…. so why not give something else a try?)

We’ve had good luck with this new mix so far, but like everything, it’s a work in progress. Subject to change, new data, new ideas. And new ideas are always welcome! If you have another salt-free solution, I’d love to hear about it. It may only just be fall, but the nip in the air has me planning…