In the fall while the bed lies fallow for winter, immediately.How soon can one use chicken manure on a garden?
In the spring or summer near planting or with plants, compost it for 6 months as a general rule.
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In the fall while the bed lies fallow for winter, immediately.How soon can one use chicken manure on a garden?
I have play sand run for 4-5 years and recently use wood chips due to the smell after the rain. As I understand, the wood chips will last about 4-6 years then decay and turn into compost.
Maybe next time add pine cones in with the leaves and such? They might help prevent the leaves from compacting so much.
Gtaus, would if be a fair presumption your run isn’t moveable?
I have had excellent results using brooders and small coops to compost exactly how you have; scraps, lawn clippings, wood chips, ect. Then after months in place I move the coop or brooder and make it a garden bed. I’ve never had anything produce such rich results in the garden as this technique. I think today I’ll shoot a video showing this spring’s tomato bed. I already have footage from when I started it.
Something I did discover with this year’s tomatoes was that if any of the run area is covered from rain, it needs a couple of weeks to get rained on before planting. Otherwise the plants added to the part of the run that didn’t have the rain mix and dilute everything will get burned. In the part of the run that did get rained on, I was able to plant the garden the same day as moving the run and the transplants immediately thrived.
We use a mini-tiller in the chicken run once a year just to loosen up and level the surface, so we can re-situate and level the cement blocks that support the coop. Then we rake and set aside the large pieces (like bark) and dig out the actual compostable material (broken-down straw, wood chips, poop, last year's bark that has broken down.) We use the compostable material as a starter for next year's compost pile, after this year's finished compost has been removed from the compost bin for use in the garden. Then we rake back the non-composted large pieces, to be a base in the coop.