When it began to appear that I’d have to actually learn something about chickens, I bought this book called The Small-Scale Poultry Flock, and among many other things it talks about a “deep-litter” method of developing compost, through the use of chickens.
I’m from Detroit, okay? I don’t know from gardening and livestock raising. Every time I get a damned seed to sprout, some mouse comes along and eats the seedling. This pisses me off. So far gardening has been nothing but frustration. But I do know I can’t go too far wrong if I think about the soil I’d want in a garden, because the soil I’ve got now is damn near sterile. I’ve got sand, or clay, or volcanic ash, but as I said no humus. What I’ve got for fertilizer is lots and lots of dry horse shit – which hasn’t composted worth a damn.
Anyway; the chickens. One thing I do know about livestock – about the only thing I know for sure – is that when you’ve got animals you’ve got dung. And you’d better know what you’re going to do with it. This book I mentioned said you should compost it, right in there with the chickens. Chicken shit, says Ussery, has lots of nitrogen. Therefore you need to counter that with lots of carbon. I used straw, which may not be the best choice but it’s what I’ve got. Between that and what little of the scraps I give them the chickens don’t eat, the busy little microbes cancel out what would by now be practically toxic levels of chicken shit. They’ve been in there for almost four months now and I haven’t cleaned out their yard once. But it doesn’t stink at all, and there’s no obnoxious build-up of chicken shit, and the straw I lay down keeps gradually crumbling and disappearing as well.
In fact, this afternoon while observing, I got to wondering where it went. So I started scraping around in the dirt. Four months ago the surface of the yard was a layer of straw over hard, dead dirt. Now the ground is soft to a depth of as much as eight inches where the chickens are most active, and it’s broken straw (and chicken shit, I presume) all the way down. It can’t really be composting all that well, because it’s too dry. But it sure as hell is breaking down.
Busy little dinosaurs…
In fact looking at that pic, taken about a month ago, I see it’s really time to add straw. I worried about digging it out, since they’re excavating quite a little pit and I don’t want to encourage them to go even deeper. But Ussery’s got an answer to that, too. He says treat it like a sourdough ball and don’t ever take it all. Just take a bunch for the (hypothetical) garden, then spread the rest and add straw and chickens. I guess that makes sense: A whole bunch of organic material has been added to that 140 sq. foot yard in four months, and the actual level hasn’t increased a lot but it has certainly increased. So taking some out shouldn’t hurt.
One thing to be careful about when using chicken manure as a fertilizer is that it is too “hot” and will literally burn the plants.
It needs to be diluted down with something else, not water either.
It needs to be mixed in with something like the horse shit to temper it.
Something else to study up on. 😉
Well I guess the composting is working, ’cause you can see it doing so. But i would have thought that you would definitely need water…
hell out there, even the dead trees don’t rot, they turn to stone!
Yes indeed… a little chicken manure – composted or otherwise – goes a long way. Just dig it into the garden and leave it over a winter to finish breaking down. When I was a new gardener, I accepted the gracious offer of a whole pickup load of plain, dry chicken manure. I spread it and lovingly dug it into the whole garden (about 50 X 50 feet). I planted seeds… and nothing. Not even weeds would grow there for more than two years. sigh Eventually, it was a wonderful garden plot, that and the one next to it that I’d had to use for two years waiting for the atomic chicken shit to break down to less than seed lethal levels. 🙂 And we had RAIN in that country, so it might take yours a dozen years or more.