Hot composting with chicken bedding and garden waste

[vehve]

Emptying out batch 5 is making temp monitoring a bit difficult. It's showing the air temp to be about 4 deg C, but the thermometer is on the empty side, so it's not showing very reliable readings. But the other side is very much active. There's a nice little cooking going on there, even though I'm keeping the pile a bit too dry. If I were to wet it properly, I think it would heat up quite nicely. But apparently that would "smell worse than broody poop", so I'm not allowed to do that. If it gets a bit colder again, I'm going to sneak some water in there again though.

 

[bamadude]

Cool thread v. 15 more pages and I will be caught up.

 

[vehve]

Nice, Bama, I'm guessing you might have something to contribute too.

Oh, the compost has started to heat up. I've been sneaking some moisture in there for a few days now, and it was +10C this morning, so by tomorrow it might be cooking. Good thing too, we need to clean the coop a bit soon and I could use the space in the compost.

 

[bamadude]

Nice, Bama, I'm guessing you might have something to contribute too.

Oh, the compost has started to heat up. I've been sneaking some moisture in there for a few days now, and it was +10C this morning, so by tomorrow it might be cooking. Good thing too, we need to clean the coop a bit soon and I could use the space in the compost.

Last year we bought a tiller. We tilled up a spot and had some success with some veggies. Some didnt do as well as we had hoped.
Our soil is super sandy. We really need to improve the soil in our garden spot somehow. I pretty much threw a bag of 8-8-8 granular fertilizer on the spot and tilled it under. I dont really want to do that again. Im leaning away from commercial fertilizers and sevin dust.

 

[bamadude]

We do have plenty of leaves that have fallen. Also we have a big igloo cooler that we raise redworms in for fishing. We use spangum peat moss as their bedding. Their bedding gets changed every 6 months. That generates some nice material for improving our soil...but not enough.
We bought this property 2 years ago. I have no idea how long it will take to get our soil like I want it....Im not going to buy any kind of material to put in it

 

[bamadude]

Oh and we get a pretty fair amount of chicken poop from 16 birds. We dont use any type of bedding. The floor of our coops are made from hardware cloth so the poop falls through

 

[vehve]

How much bedding are your birds going through? And what are you using for them?

 

[vehve]

You could look into getting some sawdust from a local mill, even if you don't want to use it as bedding for the birds, you could mix it up with the poop for composting. I'm thinking just the poop is pretty useless if you don't have any organic matter in the soil. Wood chips and that kind of stuff would work too. Spoiled hay might be something you could find cheaply too.

 

[HennyPennyCO]

Hi Bamadude!
Some comments:
For bedding in my worm bin (in the kitchen because of our cold climate) we use 50:50 shredded newspapers and autumn leaves. About once a week I feed finely chopped (& acceptable) kitchen scraps. Note that these are all no-cost items.
Yes, you do need to add some sort of browns/carbon to your greens/nitrogen chicken poop; it's way too much N to use by itself. Again autumn leaves (best if shredded), straw, wood chips, wood shavings, and the like. Wood chips & shavings take a while to decompose and use a lot of N in the process. Coffee grounds are great if you can get them but they count as N. The coffee filters (torn up or shredded) count as browns/carbon. I always tear up used paper towels & napkins too, provided they haven't been used to mop up something harmful. Shouldn't have to pay for any of these items.
Compost the items first for best results, then amend your soil with the compost. Research the 3-bin system for composting. The more cut surfaces on the items in your compost, the faster they break down, so chop/tear/shred/cut as much as you can. The soil microbes like oxygen, so turning the heaps weekly is great. They also like the right amount of moisture and heat, which is why we folks in cold climates are following verve's experimentation with his insulated bins for winter. Not much decomposition goes on when your heaps are frozen!
Sandy soil needs the water-holding capacity that humus provides. Work on a 10-year program for soil improvement, and remember that some of the humus you add each year will be used by the plants that you grow.
If you have the space for other methods, also research permaculture, Hugelkultur, sheet composting. Again, you're using stuff that is free as well as stopping it from going to a landfill. A double feel-good situation.
Another suggestion: have your soil tested by your local university extension office. We use CSU in Fort Collins, CO. In addition to soil testing, they provide a wealth of science-based information for the citizenry.

On another note: We've had a bit of a warm spell and my main compost bin was thawed enough that I could actually get a garden fork in to turn the contents!
Penny

 

[vehve]

Penny, try adding a pot of hot water to the compost, it could get it started. A gallon of 50C water seems to do wonders, maybe even hotter. The cold compost cools it down to a temp that the bacteria can handle pretty quickly, but it also helps thaw it a bit and you might get the composting started.