moving my compost

[bj taylor]

it's astonishing to me how much chickens give to life. i've had them a year & can't imagine life without them. i wish i still had the life time to have pigs, goats, a cow & all those amazing things that people used to have in life. if chickens are so amazing - i can only imagine with all the other livestock added to it. a rich fabric.

 

[April Manier]

Elliot Coleman has these composting bin systems. They are like linked hog panels. Anyone using them?

 

[catjac1975]

If you are enjoying your chickens so much, you should try your hand at hatching chicks. Of course you always get plenty of roosters and if you are not going to eat them that can be a problem. We have always timed chicks to hatch when we are having guests with kids-so much fun! We hatched and sold some Lavender Orpingtons last summer. My poor 5 year old grandson wept when we told him we were selling them. When the lady came to buy them his sad face almost made her change her mind. We hatched some more so he was happy!

it's astonishing to me how much chickens give to life. i've had them a year & can't imagine life without them. i wish i still had the life time to have pigs, goats, a cow & all those amazing things that people used to have in life. if chickens are so amazing. - i can only imagine with all the other livestock added to it. a rich fabric.

 

[Just-Moxie]

My chickens don't have access to the compost piles, but I do make my 2 compost piles out of the 4"x2" (?) fencing, wrapped in a circle. I just toss in grass clippings, small twigs, leaves, and kitchen scraps that the chickens don't get. It turns into wonderful soil in about 12 months. Oh, and some manure if I can find some. If not, I just use some garden fertilizer sprinkled in.

 

[digitS']

What we are seeing in all these compost threads and folks relating what has worked for them -- are differences in material and environment. I think RidgeRunner describes his technique well in Noahsmom's thread. Canesisters has been getting continuing ideas on her "from 'community garden' - into 'first try at a garden'" - here we have another with BJ talking about what is essentially "sheet" composting to prepare ground for gardening and now going on to 3-bin composting.

I struggled a bit with composting a long time ago. I remember investing quite a bit of work into piles of rain-damaged alfalfa hay and cow manure during one fall and then using that material in the spring. Oh, it began composting quite well. I can still remember the big square piles steaming and melting a covering of snow right thru a terrible northern Idaho winter. By spring, I had compost - right in the middle of the squares. The composting had hollowed them out like chimneys! All of my careful layering had not accomplished anything on the outer foot, or so.

After that, I think I developed patience. Soon, an 18 month schedule became composting de rigueur in my garden. I would "build" one thru the growing season with special attention about the 1st of July & after 1st frost. By spring of the following year, redworms will be massing in that material! The next spring, it is ready to use with very good texture, throughout. I'd have to pull weeds out of it during the first year since it never really heats up enuf to kill the weed seed on the surface. Also, that surface would be soil.

Initially, the "pile" went in a pit about 8" deep. The soil can be held out for use on the pile later in the season. Around the 1st of July, I'd really try to get it cooking with the addition of manure. More manure was applied at the end of the season and then the pile was "capped" with soil. My bins in one garden were concrete blocks but elsewhere, I would just try to get the soil piled around the sides as best as I could.

This semi-subterranean approach was to conserve moisture. Even tho' the piles were beside the gardens and benefited from the sprinklers, moisture-retention would be a problem without this soil covering and contact. Here, we can have next to zero rain during the summer months and humidity below 20% every summer afternoon.

I once had a neighbor who build an above-ground pile with wire netting and posts for legs. It was really quite remarkable how the "compost" was preserved in that bin with air on all sides. I'd go so far as to say that the material was petrified . The bin stood for years in the same condition, long after he stopped gardening. Finally, one leg rotted off at the soil level and it collapsed. Then, and only then, the organic material he had put in there began to decay .

Steve

 

[so lucky]

I rarely turn my compost pile, but it is available to the chickens. I notice lately they have been turning it for me pretty thoroughly. I just closed the garden gate today, to keep them out, and now all their manure from the henhouse will go on the compost pile till I get all the crops out of the garden again in late fall. Sounds very organized in theory, but I'm pretty hap-hazard in reality.:/

 

[Smiles Jr.]

I rarely turn my compost pile, but it is available to the chickens. I notice lately they have been turning it for me pretty thoroughly. I just closed the garden gate today, to keep them out, and now all their manure from the henhouse will go on the compost pile till I get all the crops out of the garden again in late fall. Sounds very organized in theory, but I'm pretty hap-hazard in reality.:/

You pretty much described my composting method. Very hap-hazard and I rarely turn it. As the years go by I find myself getting more relaxed or maybe just lax. I have four 4'x4'x4' compost bins made of pallets and I even have them numbered. But when one gets full I start dumping into the next one. Where I really get lost is when I have lots of compost material and then I put it anywhere it will fit. That's not a good way to do it at all because all four bins will end up with some composted and some not-composted materials in there and I don't know which one to dig into first. The chickens get in there almost every day and make a mess. My compost materials consist of horse and cow manure, chicken poo, a 5 gal. bucket of rabbit poo every week, mulched leaves, grass clippings (not much grass clippings because we do not bag our mowing), chopped straw, kitchen scraps (our kitchen scraps don't amount to much in the overall scheme of things), sawdust, 50 to 100 eggshells each week, and everything from the gardens that doesn't get eaten. Oh yeah, a shovel or two of garden soil (for all the wonderful organisms) each week throughout the warm seasons.

I used to just have piles, or "heaps" as we call them, and they were much easier to work with. I could turn them with front end loader on the tractor in a mater of minutes. But the bins I have now are too narrow and the front end loader will not fit in. Duh! As a result they don't get turned. When the pallets rot I plan to go back to heaps.

Regardless of the cook-time or the condition of my compost, in a few weeks ALL of it is going to go onto the veggie gardens and will be tilled in. That is if it ever stops snowing and raining.

 

[897tgigvib]

Smiles, if you are ever in a hurry to get your compost really cooking, try bagging some of your grass clippings and making a pile of them, and then put your compost over it, mixed in some, and don't use any garden soil, except maybe as a layer over the whole thing.

Wait awhile. It'll turn into Cane's Mount Rotmore! Scrape that layer of soil off if you just had to use it, and then turn it and wait. Oh boy, you'll have a hot cooking pile in a hurry! Couple more turns and waits and you have a ton of fluffy compost.

 

[annageckos]

The first time I made compost it was an accident. I was weeding at my mom's and putting everything into a trashcan. The trashcan got full and I tried to move it but it was too heavy so I left it where it was and it was forgotten about. This was in summer, it sat all winter and in the spring looked into the can while working in the garden and saw it was all nice black dirt. It wasn't a lot, maybe about 1/4 of the can was now full but the plants loved it. Now I have a long compost 'pile' kinda thing. All my guinea pig bedding alone with the hay they pull from their hay racks goes out there along with kitchen scraps and yard waste/leaves. I don't turn it and it takes about a year to be useable compost.