Ok... Serious post this time. From chicken to garden.

Firefyter-Emt

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Well, we have six hens and a 25 x 40 garden. Now to be honest, I do not have the time and proper location for a compost pile. I tried, but I just do not have the time to maintain it and it never worked. Someday might like one of those rolling bin types, but I digress...

I probably change out our coop more often than needed so the "poo to shavings" is not too high. I can rake it from the run which is covered and sand filled, but we are not talking about a lot of poo.

So, any ideas on a good way to obtain this "resource" easily and get the most from it. I have thought about a "tea" but am worried about the smell.
 

herbsherbsflowers

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You really don't have to do anything for the chicken poo and shavings to compost. Just give them a little space. You can buy little fence looking compost pile containers, and just dump your stuff in and let it sit. We only turn ours once a year and always have a nice pile of compost at the bottom that we add to the garden. It takes longer that way but it's not hurting anything just sitting there.
 

obsessed

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I would use the Deep litter method and not change the shavings so often. I don't think shaving by them self will breakdown so quick to be usable. Add some Dicotomous Earth and you should keep the smell down and have no problems. Not sure this helps.
 

Firefyter-Emt

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With a small coop, we can change it out with just one bag of shavings. We add in the whole bag, it's about five or six inches deep. We change about four times a year or so.

"Herbs" do you have a photo of your set up?
 

digitS'

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Firefyter-Emt, it sounds like you would like to make some use of the litter but don't expect it to have much in the way of plant nutrients. And, I think you are quite correct about "tea" - not my cup, anyway :rolleyes:.

Too little nitrogen and too much shavings is a problem for horse owners cleaning their stables also. Applying all that wood to their fields is a bad idea unless they add a nitrogen fertilizer.

You can buy an organic fertilizer and add it to the litter. I'll suggest a really high N fertilizer - blood meal which has about 12% nitrogen. It isn't real pleasant stuff but fertilizers never really are.

For your ornamental garden, you may just want to buy some urea or ammonium sulfate. At 21% nitrogen, you wouldn't need much ammonium sulfate (a common lawn fertilizer) to get wood shavings started towards decomposing.

I just stepped out to the carport and weighed a full bag of wood shavings. It is 35 pounds. (And, since I'm not supposed to pick up anything heavier than 20 pounds - I hope you are properly appreciative ;).)

To figure how much how much to use for your shavings you can use this resource from Colorado State University: Organic Materials as Nitrogen Fertilizers

Counting your chicken poo as zero nitrogen (so this is just pure shavings), here are some ballpark numbers using CSU's calculations:

Using urea, you would need 1.5 pounds for every bag of shavings.
Using ammonium sulfate, you would need about twice that or 3 pounds for the bag of shavings.
Using blood meal, you would need to double the amount again to about 6 pounds per bag of shavings.

I'm not sure how yours would turn out but I've added ammonium sulfate to horse manure/shavings and made good compost. I did not, however, just apply it to the garden without allowing it to decompose first.

Steve
 

Ridgerunner

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Taking this a different direction. If I want to use pure chicken poop as a nitrogen source to help compost dry grass clippings or dried refuge from my garden (corn stalks, sweet potato vines), I assume this is the 30 pounds nitrogen requirement per ton from the table. Best I can determine from this source (http://pubs.caes.uga.edu/caespubs/pubcd/B1245.htm#Table1) pure chicken manure has 64 pounds per ton of nitrogen available. Using the 18:1 ratio for carbon to nitrogen for chicken manure, this means it has 1152 pounds of carbon. Going to the 20:1 ratio required for this 1152 pounds of carbon, I have a nitrogen requirement for the manure only of 57.6 pounds of nitrogen, leaving 6.4 pounds per ton of chicken poop of nitrogen available to help break down the dried grass clippings. So to break down a ton of dried vegetable matter, Id need about 4.5 tons of pure chicken manure or a ratio by weight of 4.5 to 1 of pure chicken manure to vegetable matter.

To me, this just doesnt feel right. Id expect the chicken manure to be more efficient than that. Can someone see a flaw in either my number crunching or my basic assumptions? Any help is appreciated.
 

digitS'

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Careful Ridgerunner, you and I may be assigned to the Not-so-Easy Garden Forum ;).

For the most part, things decompose. Wood is just so much cellulose that it won't decompose quickly. At 400 to 1 carbon to nitrogen, decomposition is going to take forever and whatever micro-organisms that are at work on that wood is drawing nitrogen from other sources. If the wood is in the soil, that means nitrogen isn't going to be easily available to plants for a long, long time.

Your grass clippings are probably 12:1 to 20:1, carbon to nitrogen. That would allow the addition of carbon-rich material to the grass. Mixing only chicken manure in will make it darn near explosive . . . or something.

Of course, you are also talking about that end-of-season carbon-rich garden refuse. That could probably benefit from being half chicken manure in the compost pile. But, that's just an off-the-cuff quick guess, as is this:

The 64 pounds N per ton in that litter is probably just what is available to the plants the first year, Ridgerunner. Only about one-half of the nitrogen in manure can be readily used in field applications.

Steve
 

Ridgerunner

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As long as I get good advise like this, I'll accept being banished to a not-so-easy forum as long as I can come back and lurk here.

I recognize that getting the carbon to nitrogen ratio right can be a challenge and is crucial to the calculation. Your comment about the grass clippings having a lower ratio than the corn stalks makes a lot of sense when I look at my results.

The way I read the article I referenced, about 1/4 of the nitrogen is in the form of ammonia in fresh poop, so it may even be lower than the half in your off-the- cuff comment.

Thanks.
 

mrsgibber

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I too have six chickens and have the same problem as the OP. I change the litter weekly so there isn't ALOT of poo to shavings.

My questions is more about using this as a mulch in my vegetable garden. Is that a bad idea? I want to use an organic material for mulching to keep the moisture in over the hot summer months.

Thanks!

*Don't mean to hijack your post my fellow nutmegger. :)
 

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