Hot composting with chicken bedding and garden waste

[Lacy Blues]

That is OH SO NICE! Thank you for sharing.

 

[lazy gardener]

Truly impressive. the crew left today: It took them 6 days to thoroughly thrash my yard, removing 4 or 5 pulp trucks loaded with hard and soft wood, remove and bury stumps and rocks, grade, add some loam, and triple the amount of useable space I have. Casualties include my huge leaf pile, 2 compost piles, plantings of oregano, lemon balm, and peppermint. The soil has been turned over in a lot of areas resulting in exposed sub-soil. So, I have a lot of work ahead, including cover cropping the back area, seeding the front lawn, need to get a couple of truck loads of compost from the local dump to make a good planting media for my 7 trees. The chickens were totally terrified the first couple of days. Yesterday and today, they were lined up against the fence watching the goings on, and dust bathing while the thrashing was going on all around them.

 

[vehve]

On Sunday I moistened batch 3 a bit again, I poured about 10 liters of water into it. Now the cooking process has started again. It's 16 degrees C outside, and the air temperature inside the box is 24 degrees C. It's not as hot as I would want it to be though. There seems to be a cool breakdown going on continuously, since we pour about 10 liters of spent bedding and garden waste from the run into it every day, but the level of the matter inside stays the same.

I also got word on the hemp bedding I should be getting for test use. They said they could deliver it within a few weeks. It will be interesting to see how that works in the composter.

Last week we also did some fall fertilization of our berry bushes. I took some raw compost from batch 2 for that. So far it seems it hasn't burned the bushes, so I'm hoping for some nice growth still during fall and early next spring.

 

[vehve]

Karin thought the run was smelly so she cleaned out almost 100 liters of spent grass clippings and straw from there. I poured some water on top of it, so we should get a nice heat going by tomorrow.

 

[vehve]

14C outside, 30C inside the bin. We're cooking again.

 

[vehve]

The pile has started to shrink again. Yesterday it was up to 34 deg C, but in the morning it was down to 30 again, outside temps were down to 10 in the night. There's a nice, hot steam rising from it.

 

[vehve]

The temperature in the bin is 28 degrees C, with 16 C outside. There's a nice heat inside the pile, probably somewhere around 40-50C inside it. I keep adding a bucket of straw from the run every day plus whatever poop we remove from the coop every morning, and still the bin seems to eat the stuff at the same pace as I add to it. Here's a pic from this morning.



As you can see, I've used most of batch 2 for fall fertilizing. Batch 3 is going nicely too, it takes a couple of days for the new stuff to start going black.

 

[vehve]

Nothing much to report, I've got a nice heat going on in there. Lately there has been a lot of kitchen waste and food that's gone bad to add to the pile, different cheeses seem to create an interesting aroma.


In a few weeks I will hopefully have filled batch 3 and I can start on batch 4. Timing will be of great importance before winter, since I'll need to balance the amount of available space for winter with a large enough mass to keep the composting process going through frozen temperatures outside. The worst thing that could happen is that half way through the winter I'll have a frozen block of chicken poop and no place to put the still accumulating poop.

 

[Jetpad]

I've enjoyed your composting thread. It is amazing (but probably not surprising) how chickens lead to composting which leads to gardening and back to chickens again. My chicks a just starting to generate a usable amount of nitrogen and it is really accelerating the heating up of my compost piles compared to whats been in it in the past (just yard waste and kitchen scraps).

 

[aart]

Just read this entire thread, was clued into it by the link on vehve's signature line.
The words 'Hot Compost' caught and widened my eyes as I have been searching for comprehensive documentation/experience for a fast way to compost the pine shavings and poop from the coop.

IMO hot is the only way to go to ensure all pathogens are destroyed and I have little tolerance with slow never really breaking down 'piles'.....have had a few myself and seen many others.

Much enjoyed your thorough documentation of your process vehve, and look forward to following along in the future, thank you!

Will share my thoughts and story with HOT.....just started chickens last fall, kiln dried shavings on the floor and a roost board with sand and PDZ. I like this system, it's worked well for me. I sift off the poops every 2-3 days and planned to totally change out the floor shavings after 6 months. I have been giving the poops sifted off the roost board to a friend for his compost, but have not explored his progress...I'm a little too analytically critical/honest/direct/blunt and he's a little too sensitive for us to really discuss it, shame that but, I'm glad to get rid of it because I don't have a set up to quickly process it and I'd rather not just chuck into the woods.

So...this spring when I totally changed out the floor shavings, which contained a fair amount of feces(fresh, dried, and pulverized) some spilled chicken crumble and PDZ scratched off the roost boards, I formed a 30" diameter ring of 4' high 2"x4" welded wire mesh and piled it in the ring sprinkling what I thought was liberally with water with every 2-3" layer. It was about 30-33" high, about 13 cubic feet.

It sat, I watched it, I tried several ways of measuring the core temp, losing and then retrieving the candy thermometer was a fun one...then one day stumbled across someone who loaned me his 18" long compost/soil thermometer. I knew it wasn't very hot in there because I had done the piece of metal thing and sure enough it was barely 95 degrees. So encouraged by having this thermometer I turned the pile, I had made the mesh fence cylinder easy to remove and place in the next spot, putting 10 gallons of water on it.... yes, 10 gallons!! Well, kiln dried pine is really dry, right.....and within 24 hours that puppy was up to 160 deg F, within a few days the top had sunk in about 6" and the whole pile about 4". Eureka!!

But...alas.....I have neglected it since. Mobility issues(very bad foot and knee) and keeping up with other obligation in said condition have curtailed my progress on the compost project..and many others. It has continued to 'shrink' and grow some mushrooms and now 'moss' or algae or something on the surface. Need to make some improvements on containment(lining with plastic to keep the stuff from leaking out the holes and to retain moisture), use a shorter piece of fencing(4' too high to lift over and not necessary) and figure out a way to make it all flow to eventually start composting all that poop myself.

For now my plan is to:
-get a few fencing cylinders set up(time to change out floor bedding again before winter)
-turn the already partially cooked pile again(very curious to see what's in there)
-buy my own thermometer(remember the critical analytic part mentioned above?)
-hopefully actively monitor and turn these piles to see how the wood progresses with this process.

Only time will tell...I will post here any progress I make, and meanwhile enjoy reading about the endeavors of others participating, on this thread.

Cheers! Oh, am not metrically minded, but I use this almost everyday Josh Madisons Convert program when reading posts by those who are, and for lots of other applications.

Turned my old pile, wood shavings still mostly intact, and it only heated back up to about 90F on a 60F day.
New pile, total clean out of coop, 6cuft, did not skimp on water, got up to 125F after 2 days....gonna try to watch this one and turn it when it starts to show cooling.