Harvesting my Chicken Run Compost - Black Gold!

[gtaus]

Memorial Day is coming up, which means tonight was the Cub Scout pack's annual cemetery cleanup, and a nice influx of carbon for my chicken run compost system.

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I'm going back to pick up the 2nd load tomorrow, after I dump this load in the run in the AM.

It's really great to hear stories about people doing good deeds that are also beneficial to them. That's a true win-win. The cemetery gets cleaned up by the scouts doing a good deed, and instead of dumping all those leaves in a landfill, you can use it in your chicken run to make compost. Everybody is winning!

 

[gtaus]

I have been busy making pallet wood raised beds, sifting compost, and filling/topping off my garden beds with a mix of high quality Red River topsoil and chicken run compost mixed 1:1.

I improved my setup this year by having the topsoil and chicken run compost both at the cement mixer compost sifter at the same time. I toss in a couple shovels full of topsoil and then a couple shovels full of chicken run compost. Everything gets sifted out and drops down into the Gorilla cart under the sifting barrel wire. The rejects get turned out into the cart at the end of the barrel. Anyways, mixing the topsoil and chicken run compost this way has saved me lots of time over last year where I sifted the compost and topsoil seperately, and then mixed in a wheelbarrow later. Now, it's just one process.

In this manner, I was able to sift and mix about 24 cubic feet of topsoil/compost in about 1 hour of run time on the sifter. That filled my new pallet wood garden bed and topped off all my other beds.

Here is a picture of my new design for a pallet wood raised garden bed. All the wood was from free pallets, and I spent less than $1.00 on screws and brad nails to put everything together.

If you are interested in this pallet wood raised bed design, I have a complete post on that build with pictures on the thread Show Me Your Pallet Projects! That link should you get you to the page of the post. The actual number of the post is #1,240 in case the link only gets you to the beginning of the thread.

My goal is to build at least one more of these pallet wood raised beds, but as many as three more would be nice. I still have lots of topsoil and compost ready to sift and mix for filling any new beds.

 

[Sally PB]

That soil looks so good, I wish I were a plant!

 

[gtaus]

That soil looks so good, I wish I were a plant!

The chicken run compost I took out of the chicken run was already composted down to a rich, dark, black color. If you like the smell of dirt, it had a great earthy smell. Very nice for compost.

Picture of one wagon full of chicken run compost harvested from the chicken run this year....

In addition, that larger utility trailer in a previous post was full of Red River topsoil that I bought for $60 for a full Bobcat scoop (estimated 24 cubic feet). Together, it is making a great top layer mix for my gardens.

Again, I live on a lake and my native soil is mostly sand. Almost nothing grows well in it. So, I have to buy topsoil that the nursery hauls in from about 100 miles away in the Red River Valley. I hate the idea of paying for dirt, but I'm growing food, and poor soil results in poor plants and minimal productivity. So, it's really worth it for me to pay for the high-quality topsoil and mix it 1:1 with my chicken run compost.

FYI, I bought some local topsoil a few years ago from a different supplier, at half the price, but it was mostly sand with lots of rocks. Just terrible for a garden. I ended up removing all that bad topsoil and had to refill my beds with this good Red River topsoil. Sometimes, you really do get what you pay for, and I found out that buying our local topsoil was not only bad for my gardens, but I ended up having to remove it after one season because it was such poor quality. That's a lot of wasted time, effort and money. Lessons learned...

 

[Red-Stars-in-RI]

The Scouts did a cleanup at our sponsor fire station today....put down mulch, generally tidied up, and cleaned up some leaves and weeds. That meant about 10 more bags of mixed leaves and weeds for the chicken run.

When I got home, I found my wife had mowed the lawn and left me three barrels of grass clippings. Then my son found six more bags of leaves at the neighbors house.

So, another nice influx of carbon for the chicken run.

 

[gtaus]

The Scouts did a cleanup at our sponsor fire station today....put down mulch, generally tidied up, and cleaned up some leaves and weeds. That meant about 10 more bags of mixed leaves and weeds for the chicken run.

When I got home, I found my wife had mowed the lawn and left me three barrels of grass clippings. Then my son found six more bags of leaves at the neighbors house.

So, another nice influx of carbon for the chicken run.

That's great that you have so many people contributing to your compost project. Sounds like you will have lots of material to work with in the run. You should have a really nice mix with all those leaves and grass clippings.

 

[Red-Stars-in-RI]

That's great that you have so many people contributing to your compost project. Sounds like you will have lots of material to work with in the run. You should have a really nice mix with all those leaves and grass clippings.

Yes, it really is unofficially "community composting". There's just so much great material out there, and most people see no value in it. If I can collect it and use it, I get happy chickens and great compost.

 

[gtaus]

I have been sifting chicken run compost this past week, mixing it with topsoil 1:1. I use that mix to top off the last 6-8 inches of my raised garden beds. It really works well for me.

I snapped a quick picture of me dumping grass clippings into the chicken run.

The chickens will scratch through all those grass clippings looking for bugs to eat. And, they eat some of the grass clippings as well. It seems like it takes them less than an hour to have that mound of grass clippings leveled out and mixed into the other compost litter in the chicken run.

Having said that, we have been going through some really hot days here and I found that some places, with maybe 6 inches of grass clippings in a layer on top, that the grass was heating up and cooking. When I flipped over some grass clippings, it was actually ashen white underneath from cooking off.

That's hotter than I like for my chicken run compost system. I don't think bugs and worms could live in something that hot. So, for the past few days, I have been spreading out the grass clippings from the mower bins when I take them to the chicken run. The grass clippings are drying out fast in this heat, but when spread out at the very start, they are not cooking as hot.

I let my chickens scratch and peck the compost litter, which usually gives it enough of a good mix. But in this heat, I have considered going in there with my mini tiller and tilling in the fresh grass clippings with the leaves and other litter already in the chicken run. Also, I put the sprinkler on part of the chicken run yesterday because I have a grazing frame with new grass growing in there, and I don't want that to dry up and die out.

I normally am hands off on all the composting going on in the chicken run, but really hot days with no rain has me looking at the process and wondering if sometimes I might need to pay more attention to the chicken run composting system and intervening with extra water and tilling if required.

Fortunately for me, we are getting rain today, so the chickens don't need any help making good compost for my gardens. But I thought I should post how a normally hands free operation might sometimes be improved with small interventions. Especially if you go through a period of hot weather with no rain - which is not normal for me.

 

[Iluveggers]

Wanted to update on my compost run situation. Last year we had an 8x20 covered run with 3x20 uncovered walkway for them to use, next to the vegetable garden. Plenty of space for 10 chickens. Wel, we lost 2 ladies, and then added some new chicks, so at the end of summer during chick integration,we decided to add on a fenced section at the end of the walkway, a shady area bordering one side of the garden. Space is about 16x30.

For the fall, in the uncovered run we added a layer of wood chips after having a stump removed, and all the coop bedding, along with any veggie scraps. Once the first snowfall started to melt, we added a 1/2 bale of straw we had leftover from a landscape project. Totally missed the ball on adding & saving dried leaves as the fall was so wet and rainy I couldn’t bag any since they never dried out enough. The area started to get muddy right before adding the straw, so once the current snow melts we are going to add some more wood chips. I think having a whole season to add grass, woodchips, and other toppings, will improve this area tremendously. I also totally forgot about the paper shreds so will add those too. I have high hopes for this year! Will have to buy compost and worm castings this spring, but hopefully it will be the last time!

 

[gtaus]

I think having a whole season to add grass, woodchips, and other toppings, will improve this area tremendously. I also totally forgot about the paper shreds so will add those too. I have high hopes for this year! Will have to buy compost and worm castings this spring, but hopefully it will be the last time!

Sounds like a good plan. It's a shame to have to buy compost when you have chickens and a chicken run that can produce more compost than you could use in a year. Adding all those organics to a section of your uncovered chicken run will turn that material into compost before you know it. Once you get ahead of that curve, you will have ready to use finished compost whenever you need it!

Recently I posted on a different thread that I get a kick out of those YouTube videos that promise finished compost in one month, or three weeks, or even 10 days. All of those methods require a lot of manual labor. Because I built up a chicken run composting system, I literally have 15-minute compost anytime I want. All I have to do is fork out a wagon full of chicken run compost, sift it if I want, and apply it to my raised bed gardens.

Of course, it probably takes 4-6 months for the organic litter in my chicken run to break down into finished compost, but I now have a bank full of black gold compost anytime I want to take some out. Last year I filled all my new raised beds and topped off my old, raised beds and I estimate I still used less than 10% of my finished black gold chicken run compost. In other words, I am making 9X more finished compost than I actually use. And no turning piles, checking temps, or other labor-intensive measures to make compost fast. I let the chickens do the work for me. And they love it!

As to the paper shreds I use as deep bedding the chicken coop, I will be doing my twice annual coop clean out sometime in April. All those spent paper shreds with chicken poo will be tossed into the chicken run and turn into finished compost in about 2-3 months. The paper shreds compost very fast, especially with chicken poo mixed in. But I let that compost sit longer to let the chicken poo component cool down before using it. I just harvest the compost from a different spot in the run until that new compost has aged enough for the chicken poo not to burn the plants.

We have had a very mild winter (so far) and believe it or not, I was outside this morning raking up leaves in the yard. Those remaining leaves were too wet last fall to mow up with my riding mower, but the snow has melted most of the snow in the yard and the leaves are dry now. Unbelievable for northern Minnesota to be raking leaves in February! I usually don't start my spring cleanup until the end of April or start of May. But I have a wagon full of leaves to put into the chicken run just from one small spot in the yard. Probably finish that job tomorrow.

There are lots of worms in my chicken run compost, but I don't have a collection of worm castings. In fact, I encourage my chickens to dig into the compost and eat the worms in the chicken run. That is good for them, and it saves me a little bit on my commercial chicken feed expense. Win-win in my book.

Anyways, would love to hear your progress on making chicken run compost when you get a chance.