How do you compost your chicken poo?

[Kentucky~Momma]

What we do is throughout the planting and growing season we mix it into our regular compost pile. We treat it like anything else we put in there. After the growing season is complete we start putting piles into our garden and just keep doing this all winter long until planting time comes. We then have a neighbor that comes over and discs and plows it all in. We do not use the deep litter method so we clean out our coops between once and twice a week, so there is plenty of piles in the garden by spring. We also have one chicken tractor that gets moved all over the garden in the fall and winter that has our oegb chickens in them, and we move that about every week or two.

 

[Rio_Lindo_AZ]

I have a tray under the chicken roost and every mon the I dig a large hole in the garden and put the chicken munure in there then cover the hole up.

 

[Bubba]

I just toss it into a pile let it sit a week then take it to my compost pile. Just put it in with everything else.

Bubba

 

[sundance]

The ground where we live is so full of rocks that i just have a couple boards about 6 in tall & wide as i want my garden row to be and fill it in with the hay from the chicken house, come spring and planting time i add a couple bags topsoil, plant what ever i want cover that with fresh hay (No chicken hay) and let it grow. takes less water and i grow fine tomatoes and squash. Usually have enough to put in the freezer for alll year.


:rose

 

[digitS']

That looks like a very sensible approach, Sundance. Tomatoes and squash are good choices. My ground is also very rocky but it is more gravel and not so much large stones. Well, some of it isn't so much . . .

Something I've done so that I can get the chicken litter out of the way quickly is to dig out a bed and bury it. Taking out 8+ inches of soil and putting in 6 inches of litter has always been real safe. Apparently, the plants can stay in that top 8 inches if they don't want to get down into the manure.

I'm also a believer in the value of soil in the compost. It helps to hold moisture and really seems to speed up the composting process, as well. Too much of anything can be a problem in the compost pile. Good garden soil isn't too much of anything - it's just what you want. Further, you aren't wasting it - it'll be back in the garden with all sorts of good stuff in addition.

Steve

 

[Rosalind]

I'm trying to kill my grass, but I have too many rocks in the soil to rototill easily. This fall I raked several trees' worth of leaves over the garden, about 6-8" thick, and now I'm dumping 3-4" layers of chicken litter over that as it becomes available. I also have a couple of compost bins closer to the barn that get compost when there's over a foot of snow on the ground and the wheelbarrow won't make it to the garden.

In the summer, it'll all go in the compost bins, or get spread thinly around the orchard.

 

[Mothergoat]

We have goats AND chickens, so we accumulate A LOT of poo and soiled bedding...I use a "chicken tractor" in my vegetable garden area during the fall and winter. Besides fertilizing and taking care of weed seeds and old garden debris, this wipes out a few of the slugs, too. We have slugs the size of Holsteins here in western Oregon.

I coerce and bribe my two teenage children to clean out the deep litter in the goat barns and the chicken pens every month. They pile it in giant heaps, supported by three pallets tied together to make a 3-sided "bin." I add shredded paper, cardboard, weeds, grass clippings, leaves, whatever stuff I can get my hands on. Not many kitchen scraps; those go to the pile via the henhouse. I also sprinkle in wood ashes, scrunched eggshells, and some shovelfulls of our heavy clay soil and a little sand from a pile I had delivered. Wiggly red worms get going around the edges of the pile, and later in the middle, too, after it has cooled down. The chix get up on top and scratch out worms all the time, so we have to pile the stuff back up. That's sort of how we keep it "turned." It makes wonderful fluffy black stuff after about six months. My kids sack it up in old feed sacks and sell it to relatives and friends for a buck a bag.

When I run out of room in the pallets, I just put down cardboard or piled up newspapers over an area of weeds/grass that I want to convert to garden, and then pile the poo and bedding up about 8 inches thick or more on top of that. I add a little sand from my "pile." After a few months of winter rains, I can just plant right in the "stuff." No weeds, no tilling. I just keep piling on more finished compost as the plants grow.

I wouldn't know how to grow anything if I didn't have my critters to take care of my soil.

 

[digitS']

Can you tell us Mothergoat how many goat and chicken garden friends you have?

digitSteve

 

[Mothergoat]

We have about 25 goats, counting this year's kids that are still with us. We have Nubians, Pygoras, and a few pygmies. My daughter has a pair of colored Angoras, too. She's training some of the Nubians as pack goats. I think there are about 50 chickens out there. My son made an incubator out of an ice chest, and somehow we keep getting more birds. One day I came home to find he had five ducks. I purposely don't ever actually count the total number of critters. I need "plausible deniability" should my DH ever ask for a headcount.
Rogue River? I was born in Crescent City; we lived in Douglas Park on the Smith River, property backed up to Jedediah Smith State Park. I still love to visit there. We moved away when I was still a little sprout.

 

[Buff Shallots]

Since my chicken coop shavings & poo (deep litter method) have been in my two enclosed composters, they have hardly decomposed at all. It's been about 5 months.

So today I got some Espoma "Bio-Excelerator" compost activator powder from Agway.

Has anyone else tried a compost activator (besides Nifty who uses grass clippings). We don't have grass where we live, just dormant forest-type long grass in the woods, and we don't mow it.