Compost is Ready!

[ninnymary]

My compost with my chicken poop is ready! Now, I need to figure out whether to put it in my garden this fall or next spring.

The only fall/winter veggies I plan to put in is bok choy and garlic.

Should I add my compost in the fall or spring?

Also, I used rice straw for mulch this year and was wondering if I should remove it and add it to my new compost pile that I will be starting or till it in. I don't want it to sprout and I want to make sure that it breaks down.

What do you think?

Mary

 

[Warthog]

I don't know about rice straw, but I have been putting the waste hay with chicken, goat and sheep poo straight on my borders, and with all the rain we have had recently, plus the hens scratching around in it for bugs and things, it is already begining to break down.

 

[bid]

I say go ahead and add the compost now, your garlic will benefit from it. Plus you can add the compost over the whole bed or just where you want it now.

The rice straw I would use to start a new compost pile as I think it breaks down slower than other straw mulches. That's my 2 cents worth!

 

[RickF]

I've got a question for you.. I've got a ~4x4 hen house full of lots of chicken poop mixed with pine shavings. I was planning on using the deep litter method to keep it going until next summer but my wife wants to use it for compost. Since it is not yet composted I'm not sure we should be using it directly on plants just yet. To that end, IF we decide to compost it can I just add green grass to it to start the composting cycle? I'm assuming the poop & pine shavings are considered 'brown' or am I wrong here? I've got a few 50G barrels I could use for this that have some holes in them for ventilation.

 

[lesa]

Ninny- I like to put down the compost and/or chicken poop in the fall and let nature do it's thing over the winter. (But I am in a much different climate....)
Rick, we were just talking about this on another topic of composting. Unfortunately, those chips take about 3 years to compost. It is best, IMO, to try to collect chicken poop (with a dropping board, etc.) and keep it seperate from the chips. I have spread the chips on a garden in the late fall and then raked them up in the spring. Figuring some of the poop washes off into the soil...

 

[bid]

The chicken dropping would be considered a "green" as it is high in nitrogen. Greens= nitrogen, browns= carbon in terms of compost lingo.

 

[RickF]

Thanks for the info.. I was wondering if the pine might take that long as it's not exactly paper (yet).. When the 4 chicks were still in the house we were changing the bedding weekly and would put the not so good smelling material on some of the trees in the yard and none seemed to get too bothered by it but the chickens (later) were sending that stuff all over the yard. I raked up a bunch of dead grass the other day in an effort to clean up some of the chicken poop strewn about the yard (so the kids don't carry it back into the house on the bottom of their shoes) and left it only to find the birds completely scattered the pile by the end of the day! Go figure.. At least the bugs in the yard (and weeds) are in control!

 

[lesa]

Gotta love chickens!! Some people put their compost piles in their chicken runs, for that very reason... the chickens do the turning! I used some of the wood chips around my blueberry bushes as mulch-since they like acid. It's not that they are not usable, just take a long time to disappear...With only 4 chickens and your beautiful weather, I don't think you will have a tremendous amount of wood chips to deal with anyway.
My daughter is a city girl now. A few days after she visited she was in a class and texted my to tell me she had chicken poop on the bottom of her shoe! Ooops!

 

[RickF]

Gotta love chickens!! Some people put their compost piles in their chicken runs, for that very reason... the chickens do the turning! I used some of the wood chips around my blueberry bushes as mulch-since they like acid. It's not that they are not usable, just take a long time to disappear...With only 4 chickens and your beautiful weather, I don't think you will have a tremendous amount of wood chips to deal with anyway.
My daughter is a city girl now. A few days after she visited she was in a class and texted my to tell me she had chicken poop on the bottom of her shoe! Ooops!

Thanks.. Unfortunately we put a bunch of sand in the bottom of the run (sorry if I'm hijacking the thread!!) and we find the sand (much like kitty litter) wants to clump on the poop which means eventually your sand will disappear as the poop is removed.. I'm thinking we should not have used the sand perhaps and that would have made cleanup easier than what I'm getting with the sand in place.. Are you suggesting that I could probably just dump the bedding from the coop into the run and just let the hens do their 'thing' over the course of the winter.. Some of the edges might get a bit damp though if the rain is blown around but the vast majority of our rain is usually straight down (e.g. little to no wind)...

 

[lesa]

Rick, I don't love the idea of putting the dirty bedding in the run... seems like it might really get messy. I think the people that put compost in the run are doing it with leaves, kitchen scraps, etc. I wouldn't hesitate to put the "sandy poop" in a compost pile. A little sand mixed in your garden soil isn't going to hurt anything. Good luck! Let us know what you figure out!