Using Chicken Manure in the Garden

Good morning everybody. I am out here in the chicken yard today which has kind of turned into a chicken compound because I wanted to share with you the second video in a series on how I use chickens in my garden. Today I wanted to cover one very valuable asset that chickens can provide to a backyard garden and that is, you probably guessed it, fertilizer. I know that many of us have concerns about the potential lack of but the good news is there are plenty of natural options available to the home gardener and chicken poop is a great one. Now I thought that this information from the University of Nevada Extension really summed up the benefits of chicken manure well. Composted chicken manure provides a slow release source of macro and micronutrients and acts as a soil amendment. Compared to other manures, chicken manure and the associated litter are higher in nitrogen, potassium, phosphorus, and calcium and are also rich in organic matter. That organic matter is an important component in improving your soil structure as well as feeding the microorganisms that live in the soil. That organic matter provides a food source for soil microbes which increases soil biological diversity accelerating the breakdown of organic nutrients All of these factors can improve the health of the plants in your garden. One very important thing to keep in mind though when planning on using chicken manure in your garden is that uncomposted or unaged manure can contain harmful pathogens. It can also burn plants due to the high ammonium levels so you definitely want to compost it or age it before you use it in the garden. But if you keep or are thinking about keeping a small flock composting their manure and the litter or the bedding that you use in their coop is a relatively simple process. The first step is to give your chicken bedding some consideration. So if you're planning on composting just pick a bedding material that is easily compostable. I've always used a mixture of wood shavings and straw and both of those materials work well. The second step is to decide on your composting method. Now there are two main methods to consider when composting chicken manure and that's hot composting or cold composting and both of them have pros and cons. If you want composted chicken manure in a hurry one of the best options is the Berkeley hot composting method which allows you to get finished compost from your chicken manure and bedding in as little as 18 days. This hot composting method can help to kill weed seeds and those higher temperatures also stop many pathogens from reproducing. The cons of the Berkeley hot method are that it is more hands-on and labor intensive and there are a few important keys to success when opting for the Berkeley hot method. The first is to get your carbon nitrogen or your green to brown material ratio correct. Sources vary a bit on the recommended ratio but most seem to land on a ratio somewhere between 20, 25, or 30 to 1 carbon to nitrogen. It will vary a bit depending on the specific materials you use. Now examples of green material or materials that are high in nitrogen include garden or food waste, weeds, green wood, hay or grass clippings, manure, fish. And examples of brown material or high carbon include wood chips or sawdust, shredded cardboard or newsprint, straw or leaves. In the case of my chicken coop I've got both the carbon or brown material, straw and wood chips, and the green or nitrogen material, manure, already mixed together. Since the ratios can be a bit tricky to figure I use a rule of thumb of three parts carbon or bedding to one part nitrogen or chicken poo. Building the pile is relatively simple. Some sources suggest if you're starting with individual materials that you add thin strips of green then brown to build the pile. In the case of chicken litter it's pre-mixed so I just dump it all onto the pile only adding additional greens or browns if I feel like my balance is off. Now your ratios will depend on how much what kind of bedding you use, how many birds you have, and how often you clean out your coop. But I find that by using the deep litter method with around six mature birds my balance of carbon to nitrogen is pretty close to spot on. You also want to shoot for a moisture level of around 50 percent. Dampish but not sopping wet. So if your material is very dry you can water the whole pile. Now you can also add activators to speed up the process. They sell activators for compost that can be purchased online or at local stores but you can also use things like comfrey, dead fish, and urine as an activator. Now the size of the compost heap is important. It should be approximately four feet high and three by three feet wide and long. Days one through four you're just going to let your compost heap sit. Day five you want to start the turning. So turning the pile is very important and you want to be very thorough. So you're going to turn the whole thing upside down and inside out and this process has to be repeated on every second day. So five, seven, nine, eleven, on and on all the way up to seventeen. And on day eighteen your compost should be finished. So your pile should be warm not hot, it should smell good and earthy not foul or rotten, and you should start to see some earthworm activity in and around the compost pile. A second composting option is cold composting. And the advantage to cold composting is it is very hands-off. So you're basically just throwing all of your organic matter including chicken manure and chicken litter into a compost pile and letting it sit. The disadvantage to cold composting is that it takes a long time. So typically anywhere from six to twelve months to get finished compost. Cold compost piles can also be prone to foul odors. A lot of times this is due to the center of the pile not getting enough oxygen, especially when you don't turn your piles. And sometimes when using chicken poo it can get extra stinky. So a way to avoid this in cold composting piles is to actually when you're cleaning out your chicken manure put it on a tarp or something let it dry in the sun and then add it to the compost pile. Now most sources also recommend curing your compost that contains animal manure for eighty to a hundred and twenty days before using it in an area where you're growing crops for food. Now I get around this by applying the compost or composted manure to my planting areas in the fall prior to planting in the spring and that works out really well for me. And the idea here is that you just don't want to risk any kind of pathogens being spread from the poo to the food that you're eating. Now there are a few tricks you can use to make this whole process even easier. And the first is the deep litter method. So this is a method that I employ in my own chicken coops which gives me the benefit of both minimizing the number of times that I actually need to clean out the entire coop as well as giving me a jump start on the composting process. Using a deep litter method is just about the easiest thing you can do. To start out I apply three to four inches of bedding in my coops and as I mentioned I opt for wood shavings or straw or a combination of both. And rather than cleaning them out frequently I'm only cleaning them out about twice a year. Typically I do spring and fall. But I am adding an extra inch or so of bedding every couple of months. The chickens obviously are pooping and peeing and scratching which is what is jump starting that composting process. I know that some folks have concerns that the deep litter method may not be healthy for their flock but it actually can be a healthier option. The microorganisms that are responsible for breaking down the droppings in the coop can also protect chickens from coccidiosis, a potentially deadly intestinal parasite. The presence of these beneficial microbes has also been shown to help prevent infestations of lice and mites. There's also some evidence that young chicks immune systems may be boosted in a deep litter system. Now as I mentioned I clean out my coops twice typically the spring and the fall and when I do this I just remove all the contents and add those either to the compost pile or directly into any new hoogle culture beds that I am building. Now another way to make this whole process easier in particular the gathering of manure and the cleaning of bedding is using an egg glue coop to house your flock. Now this is a great option especially if you have a smaller flock and you can't really do a deep litter method in one of these egg glue coops. But like I said the convenient design of this thing really makes collecting that manure a simple process. The egg glue coop has a tray that's underneath the roosting area for the birds and it just slides completely out of the coop. The side also opens so that I can easily scoop out all of the bedding when it's time to make a change. And these contents again can go directly into my compost pile, they can go into new hoogle culture beds, or this material can be collected until I have enough to make a pile for a hot composting method. For anyone interested in your own egg glue coop click on the link in the video description below and use my promo code GROW10 for 10% off your order anytime between now and November 27th of 2022. And perhaps the easiest of all and a method that I utilize a lot is just fertilizing in place. To do this I simply fence off a section of land or an existing part of the garden that needs some help and house my flock there. Now again the omelette coop makes this really easy because it's very very portable and easy to move to a new location so I can kind of pen up my birds wherever I need them to focus their efforts. But by doing this I'm allowing my flock not only to work on weed and pest control, so they will eat weeds, they eat weed seeds, they eat insects, they also scratch up the soil, and of course in the midst of doing all this they're pooping everywhere so they're just kind of by nature spreading that fertilizer all over the section of land. And the period of time will vary so I've done this with as few as three chickens, in which case I left them there from the fall until the following spring. I've also fenced in as many as 40 birds in an area of the garden, but in that case I only left them there for about a month and a half and the job was done. Now typically after I move them out I will allow that area to rest for about a month, at which point I will work all of that leftover bedding and manure and anything that's left in there into the soil, and then I typically try to plant a cover crop prior to planting my fruit or vegetables or whatever is going to go into that area. Now similar to this you could just take the contents of your chicken coop when you clean it out, spread it over a garden bed, and let that sit from fall into spring, and you'd achieve a lot of the same effects. Now to see this whole process in detail of where I created a chicken run which then eventually turned into a new garden, check out the video linked above. And be sure to stay tuned for more updates on how I let my little backyard flock work to the benefit of my Ohio garden. Thanks for watching and I'll see you next time. Oh you're gorgeous Freddie, you're gorgeous! The camera loves you!