Fresh chicken manure may contain disease organisms that could contaminate root crops carrots, radishes, beets and leaves lettuce, spinach , so DO NOT spread uncomposted manure on the soil in your vegetable garden. Dig deeper! Sign up for one of Seattle Tilth's Urban Livestock or Permaculture classes to learn more about city chickens and composting.
Fall, Advanced Search…. Composting Chicken Manure. Chickens Produce Eggs and Manure Your chicken produces an egg every 24 hours and it is wonderful to have your own home-produced fresh eggs. If used without composting it could damage roots and possibly kill your plants, however, once it is composted chicken manure is: A good soil amendment, chicken manure adds organic matter and increases the water holding capacity and beneficial biota in soil.
A good fertilizer; chicken manure provides Nitrogen, Phosphorus and Potassium to you plants more than horse, cow or steer manure. Composting Chicken Manure If you are not familiar with composting and need to learn how, contact the Seattle Tilth Garden Hotline at Here are some recommendations to get you started using chicken manure in your compost pile: Collect manure and bedding.
Chicken owners normally use bedding such as shavings, sawdust, dry leaves, or straw to provide a dry cushion for chickens and to control odor and pests. The coop bedding can be collected with the manure and dumped into a composting bin. Some owners prefer to pick manure and soiled bedding out of the coop on a daily basis; others will add new bedding over droppings and collect on a less frequent basis.
Carbon to Nitrogen balance. A combination of 30 parts Carbon to 1 part Nitrogen creates the ideal environment for microbes to break down organic material to produce compost.
When combining coop bedding and chicken manure how do you achieve the ideal C: N ratio? Since the different beddings have their own C: N ratio, the proportion of bedding to manure will vary depending on the type of bedding used.
To keep things simple most composters follow the general rule of 1 part brown to 2 parts green. However, because chicken manure is so high in Nitrogen you may be more successful using a or even a mixture. By combining the correct ratio of bedding and manure at one time to form a pile, approximately one cubic yard, then adding moisture material should be about as wet as a well wrung sponge , will produce a hot pile.
It is recommend that the compost pile heat to degrees F and maintain that temperature for 3 days. People talk about the chore of cleaning the coop. I just do not have that chore. I do not scrape poop and I do not have a manure management issue. In early spring, I add a nice layer of compost and some organic fertilizer to my garden beds to prepare them for spring planting.
In late fall, I top dress beds to protect the soil from rain and compaction. Within a day or two of scraping the coop floor bare, I bring in another bale or two of fresh straw, cut the bailing line, and maybe kick the bale open for the hens. They take it from there, happily tossing their nice new bedding hither and yon all the run, and the process starts again. In six months, if I want it, another several cubic yards of compost will be mine for the harvesting. Everything about composting has changed.
The whole process has been re-framed into a system that requires less work and money and effort and guilt! This is a far lower effort and far lower input way compost and it makes for a fairly tight loop. It works. This is the direction I want to go with my garden in general: lower cost in time, effort and money in maintenance, more loops that feed themselves, more reward, less effort. The coop compost experiment has shown me that easier and better can go hand in hand.
If you suck at composting, just consider delegating the whole process. I love the multitude of ways composting is covered in this book, it opened my eyes to the idea that there were a lot of techniques outside the bin I could experiment with. I garden, keep chickens and ducks, homeschool my two kids and generally run around making messes on my one-third of an acre in suburban Seattle.
Thanks for reading! Egg boxes for the hens lined one side of the coop. Hay and straw were thrown in for the floor covering, and were added weekly, primarily at the BACK of the coop under the rabbit pens. Chickens turned and picked beneath the rabbit pens. I think they liked the poop. I also threw all my kitchen scraps to the back of the coop.
So, between the rabbits pooping and peeing, the chickens turning and digging and pooping and pecking, I had dream-worthy compost at the back of that coop all the time.
It was heaven…. My chickens compost in my tomato greenhouse every winter…. We have a moving hen house that we back into the greenhouse for the winter….. I love my ladies! I teach the gardening class at a local middle school and have the kiddos come out to my place a couple of times a year to harvest the garden gold. They fork the compost in the run into my used feed bags a wonderful way to recycle them!
Once the tea is ready after agitating the panty hose every day for four or five days, it is ready for the garden. It is relatively diluted but is still a wonderful way to water our plants.
It can be applied to foliage without fear of burning and the plants absolutely glow with health! I had planned to build a compost bin. However just learned about the deep bedding method yes, I have chickens … for a year so far. Do you still use your compose bin? Thanks in advance! I throw some soil or used litter from the ducks or chickens in it every now and again to get it going a bit. Similar results — no smell, bug control, mite control, nutrients in the earth if the chickens eat it.
Great post!! Please clarify if you can, are you lining the entire ru. With hay and then using the whe run for compost or just a corner or section? I am looking into creating a compost for my chickens to work but thought I would have to do it way off to one side and fence it in so it stays together. If I understand your post you let them scatter it and take it up a coue times per year.
That would work just fine with me if it is okay for the chickens. We may be buying a pond house with knotty naughty? Since it's in New England and will be our retirement home, we really want to lighten up the place. I may preserve it in the sunroom though, just for fun and a change of pace Help Q.
Are you asking about chipping when you are working with the wood, or when you are using it as a headboard? I would guess that door is covered with lead paint and would think twice about using it as is. You might encapsulate the entire door with a clear finish which help seal the existing paint, and help keep what paint is on there from further pealing. Hello Mbedwell If you are looking for a solid color cabinet finish but are concerned about durability you have 3 options Option 1 - I would look at an RTF cabinet door.
They are a thermally fused layer of vinyl on a mdf core. You can get them in various traditional profiles now. Everything from shaker to multiple raised panels. You can even buy moulding that are wrapped so it's not hard to match crowns or light rails to the door finish. This is one of the most durable doors I know off. The biggest Draw back is you are limited to manufactures color palette. Option 2 - Would be an acrylic or textured melamine door with 2 or 3 mm edgebanding.
This would limit you to a slab door only as profiles aren't available with this route. This is an extremely durable route and what would be considered "commercial grade" Option 3 - Is a lacquered finish.
This is likely the least durable option of the 3 and I would have to disagree with above posters as to it not chipping. Any pre or post catalyzed lacquer will or has the ability to chip. We build kitchens out of this all the time. It's not that you need to have your white gloves on when you are in the kitchen. But hard knocks with sharp or hard objects will chip the finish. The advantages of this method are numerous and included an unlimited color palette as we can color match any BM color.
Freedom of design, we can build anything that you can dream up and have it sprayed to match. This is likely the most popular finish in our market for the mid to high range solid color kitchen. I hope this helps. If you have any further questions don't hesitate to ask. Thanks Ethan. Wrong if you live near the coast in Southern California south of Santa Barbara.
I would make sure to treat all wood framing including your windows with a form of borate with a glycol attached so it soaks far into your wood to protect from termites; especially if you have a flat roof where you will inevitably have water intrusion with resultant termite attack.
Low-cost option to protect your structure and windows. Better yet don't build with wood use hempcrete or other resistant material to bugs and earthquake. I now have a home that is only 30 years old with termite damage and lost a house to termites in Florida due to a roof leak and resultant termites 3 years ago. Very helpful. Oooh, a compost calculator?! This might be indispensable, thanks, lucky! Related Stories.
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