Next years compost

[bj taylor]

monty, that's a beautiful pile. gonna grow some great stuff with that. Red, that is a smart idea. i have three big raised beds, i might try that next year.
on another forum, i read where a woman used a tractor to mix up her compost. now that's a lot of compost.

i actually think i'm going to have pretty good success with mine this year. having the chicken manure and goat poop is great.

 

[canesisters]

Thistle, I have pine bedding on the floor of the coop. Several weeks back I re-did the roost to be wall to wall with a shelf under it. The shelf is covered in about 3" of PDZ. Every couple of days I take a kitty litter scoop and in less than 5 mins I have several inches of compost gold in my bucket. It's REALLY helped with flies and smell too.

 

[MontyJ]

Because of the size of my garden, I pretty much have to compost this way. I could never make enough to cover the entire garden, so I have to be selective and use it as I plant. Some plants don't get compost (beans, corn, potatoes), while others get double handfulls at planting time (tomatoes, peppers, broccoli cabbage...etc) and some get a 2" layer tilled in before planting (onions, carrots, beets, turnips). To be able to spread 3" over the entire garden would require 800 cubic feet of compost...

 

[majorcatfish]

nice looking pile you got going there.
800 cf = 29 cubic yards yikes that would be a lot.

 

[Ridgerunner]

It depends on what your soil is like to start with but I think what compost does for the texture of my soil is about as important as the nutrients it provides. Compost is about as close as you can come to a magic ingredient to probably any garden.

My garden is not nearly as big as Montys but I have to ration what I make too. I just dont make enough. I dont clean my coop out often but I have a droppings board to collect poop and put it in the compost. That adds up to a lot of chicken poop. But a neighbor usually brings me two front end loader loads of mostly composted cow manure in late summer. I spread that over as much of my garden as I can in the fall and till it in in spite of the weed and grass seeds in it. I mulch a lot of stuff, usually using wheat straw over newspaper. Its easy to tell where that gets worked into the soil. It would be a lot harder for me to garden in there without all that organic material, especially in that strip of clay right down the middle.

Yeah, Monty on the scale you garden you need something like that. That is an impressive pile.

 

[Southern Gardener]

Nice job Monty! I've got two piles cooking right now with grass clippings.