Hot composting with chicken bedding and garden waste

[vehve]

Well, the compost has been mostly cold since I emptied it. The left side is resting, and going down in size a bit. Yesterday I emptied the toilet box from the bunny hutch to the right side, so I now have about a 8 inch layer of kitchen waste, coop bedding and bunny toilet bedding in there. I decided to wet it down properly so that I don't get the same issues with the dry bottom as before. I don't think it's a big enough mass to start cooking properly yet, but you never know. That rabbit pee and poop has a lot of nitrogen in it. It did end up a little sawdust heavy though (I had run out of hemp so we had to use pine shavings). I received six bales of hemp in the mail on Monday though, so now we should be good for a year again. Thanks to my reporting on how it's functioning and providing some pictures as advertising material, we got six bales for the price of three. Not a bad deal.

 

[aart]

Did you know you can use rabbit manure straight onto plants? Won't 'burn' them.

I had a buddy who had rabbits rig a slanted 1/4" mesh under the hutch, the poops ran down the mesh into a pile in a place sheltered from rain and the urine went thru the mesh onto the ground. Easy peasy to scoop up dried turds to use as fertilizer when planting my garlic.

 

[vehve]

I don't want to use the poop straight on the plants as long as the plants are inside, at least. As for collecting them, I'll probably scoop some up from the toilet box with a kitty litter scoop later in the growing season. The wire mesh floors are illegal for rabbits in Finland, and I wouldn't want to use them anyway. Hilma weighs about 12 lbs, her paws couldn't handle the strain. I prefer to make a more natural environment for her, while the wire mesh floors work well from a ease of maintenance perspective, they're in direct contradiction with my beliefs of humane animal treatment. Plus, you end up with either soil that stinks of urine, or then you'll have to have a collection bin underneath the cages. Emptying a bedding filled toilet bin isn't any more work either, and since I'll mostly be composting the stuff, I get a pretty good carbon to nitrogen relation in the spent bedding and I can just dump it into the compost. Doe's are mostly pretty cleanly, and Hilma doesn't really do her business anywhere else than the little toilet box. Bucks would be a different case though, they tend to mark their territory, from what I've understood. And rabbit pee is pretty nasty stuff, it's very condensed.

 

[aart]

Oh that's right forgot about the illegal mesh.
Only part of these hutch floors were mesh, because of the foot problems, they tend to eliminate in one area.
He also had wood chips on the ground to soak up the urine and composted those separately.

 

[vehve]

The compost has still been pretty cold lately, but today we emptied the old bedding from the run, so I got a bit of a mass in there again. I might need to actually get the new thermometer installed there now so that I can monitor how this batch develops.

So, any old or new readers starting new compost piles? Anyone thinking of building a hot composter this spring? Now is the perfect time to build one.

 

[aart]

I'm thinking about it...or at least how to compost the 6 months worth of shavings that need to come out of the coop in the next few weeks....it's on the list after:
Trimming trails until the leaves come out too full for it to be easy.
Butchering old hens so the brooder population can come out to the coop partition(space is getting tight in the coop).
Coop shavings will change between butchering and partition wall installation <rolleyes>

I'll probably just use wire mesh rings again, might turn over the 2 existing ones and see how they are doing first and decide what to do with those.

 

[hennible]

I'll be building one Felix, at some point....

 

[vehve]

It is mandatory to document your compost builds in this thread. Or strongly suggested. Or it's a recommendation. Heck, just take some pics.

One build that would be cool to see would be if someone would try making a tumbler composter out of one of those 1000 liter caged plastic water container things. I bet that would be big enough for it to actually work.

 

[vehve]

Oh, also, a word of warning. If you do start building a compost, I will be making a lot of suggestions and critiquing your design, with an air of "I know everything about composting". At that point, please keep in mind, that I really don't know everything about composting, and that I've only been doing it for a year.

 

[hennible]

Lol
I won't post a thing till I'm done....