Nasty Chicken Heebie-Jeebies

Yesterday and today I have had the willies.  I'm grossed out to the max!

 So I'm going to gross you out, too.

I found teeny, little white eggs ON my chicken eggs!  Some nasty worm or parasite has reared it's ugly head.  I've done my googling and found a worm medicine, Flubenvet, that I hope will be effective.  But worms are just so nasty!  Shane says he'll give me an allowance bonus if I just get rid of the chickens altogether.  Would you take the bribe?  It's a cool 100 bucks.  Tempting.

Today I began pulling up old fence posts and pounding them into the ground to make a second chicken yard.  I have loved the circle of life idea of rotating my girls, letting them feed and fertilize, then gardening with natures own nutrients, while they feed and fertilize(decimate and poop on) another patch of land.  Can you tell the charm and enchantment has fallen away?  Gardening on worm eggs that can incubate in regular inchworms is SO not appealing.  

Right now their chicken yard is all white.  I've sprinkled diatomaceous earth all over the place.  Mixed it in their food, spread it inside the floor of their coop, sprinkled it in their favorite dusting places, sprinkled it over their backs and feathers and all through the compost pile.  It is little crustacean shells that kill little things because they are sharp.  To us, it's like a fine powder, but to eggs, slugs, worms, parasites, etc, it's like broken glass.  Or so I hear!  I figure it can't hurt and might help.  

The cause of all this MAYHEM??  Dare I admit the guilt and sin?  A dirty coop.  I piled the straw high and deep all winter long, just stirred it every week or so to let the heavy stuff fall to the bottom, while the fluffy straw was on top.  Worked good, too.  But.  I stopped stirring it once I decided to clean it out altogether.  Isn't that weird?  I decide it's time for a spring cleaning, but then don't get around to it.  Meanwhile, I stop cleaning altogether.  And I'm sure that a dirty coop is the fastest way to make sure worms show up.  Nevermind that there's a little mouse in the coop, which we've named Hanta.  Collecting eggs is now yucky instead of charming.

A sad tidbit: lately, the pecked egg thing is getting so bad that even though I harvest 3-5 eggs a day, I have to pitch most of them.  Today, for example, Aidan collected the eggs without a basket.  Two eggs to a hand.  Dropped one.  I took them inside, threw away two for eggs on the shell(one had been pecked), threw away one good egg because Aidan dropped it in the chicken pen and I was down to one.  However, we aren't eating any eggs, since roundworm can show up INSIDE the egg.  And I have no idea what worm this is, and I'm not eating it.  No arguments!  So no eggs at all.  *toss*  *toss*

So to summarize, here's a few ideas to help solve and prevent this problem.  I'll be leaning heavily on any chicken advice, so speak up!  

1) diatomaceous earth

2) Flubenvet meds with a two-step plan

3) Building a coop up off the ground? (but will they freeze in winter, which can go sub-zero?)

4) Keeping my loser self to a cleaning schedule.

I'm interested in trying large pebble sand in the coop for the summer, to keep them cool and then treat it like a litter box with a big scoop (like the one I use to clean up mountain lion poop at Wildlife West!).  I would go back to hay in the fall for warmth during winter.  Any flaws in a plan like this?