Hot composting with chicken bedding and garden waste

[vehve]

Kusanar, how's the compost doing?

I haven't been updating this thread in a while, but my compost is doing fine. I've got two compost cages full of resting stuff, I need to put it to use in the spring. Luckily I already have a project planned for it. I might need to get a third one at some point though.

I'm going to have to do some maintenance on my compost soon, the marine plywood separator is starting to give up. It's lasted for two years in a constantly we environment, and it was second hand to begin with. That's pretty decent. Come spring I'll have to empty out the whole thing, put in a new separator, and maybe change the tarps.

It's about 20F outside at the moment, and the compost is about 70-80F. It's heating up at the moment though, I just emptied it about a week ago. Lately I haven't been turning or wetting it all, I just empty the left side, and move the contents from the right side to the left, soaking them completely in the process. Seems to be working pretty well, although the bottom 4-6 inches stay too dry to break down.

 

[Kusanar]

I haven't been turning it much, so it is doing a slow burn. I never get it in a cage though, so that might be keeping it cooler. When I do turn it, I check moisture, water between the layers as needed, then when it's done, I cover it with some fresh stuff to keep moisture loss down, the fresh stuff is mixed in next time it is turned. Plus, my fresh stuff is from the shed, my shed has 5 horses eating out of a round bale feeder, so there is some hay which is already soaked in urine and has manure ground into it, plus it is on a dirt floor, so the microbes have already started attacking it. Makes a nice cover layer for the compost. The compost has gotten hot, but not hot enough to kill some pumpkin seeds that are in there, they are sprouting, also the grass under the pile is still growing....

 

[vehve]

Well, at the moment my compost is pretty cold, it was down to about 3C (35F). I did a bit of turning, and added about 2 gallons of warm water, in which I had mixed some yeast and sugar. I'm going to have to tend to it daily for a while now, and maybe get some secret ingredient in there again. I'm also thinking of whipping up some peasant cheese since the whey from that tends to get things going in the compost.

The box has been putting out a bit of steam though, because the lid had frozen shut this morning. I had to give it some TLC with a 2 by 4 to get it to open.

 

[lazy gardener]

Amazing how persuasive those 2 x 4's can be. I built some doors to access my nest boxes from outside the coop. As usual, I made them just a tad big... not taking into account the fact that the wood would swell in the outside weather. Had to persuade them several times. Finally got them trimmed down yesterday.

 

[vehve]

Yeah, on a foot wide door you can get a quarter inch difference, something to take into account when building.

 

[lazy gardener]

Yep, we allowed for that... just not enough.

 

[vehve]

I hear you, last winter I was out in freezing rain, trying to trim down my egg nest hatch with a woodworking knife. I had to take it down half an inch, even though it had about an eight of an inch of clearance in drier time. But the rain hit it directly, making it swell. Now I have a rubber lip that hangs down over the lid a bit, keeping drafts and moisture down to a minimum.

 

[vehve]

So, as the compost was getting fuller and fuller, and not doing a thing due to the severely cold weather, I kept trying to pour about a gallon or two of warm water into it daily, but that didn't do much when temps were around -20C (0F). About a week ago it warmed up though, to around -5C (20F). And on Tuesday, the weather turned to above freezing and we've been getting some rain, something I normally don't enjoy in the winter, but finally the compost is showing life signs again. Parts of it are still frozen, especially lower down and towards the sides, but the middle and top are heating up, and I even got a nice steam out of there this morning. If I were to venture a guess, I'd say it's nearing 20C (50F) in the middle. But this means it's starting to heat up, and soon it should melt itself completely and put on a nice heat. The chickens had been cooped up through the coldest weather, and we also cleaned the rabbitry about a week ago. That means I got about a gallon of chicken poop, a gallon of rabbit pee and some hemp, and two gallons of rabbit poop into the compost. Now that all of that has thawed, it seems to be fueling the compost pretty nicely. It's probably way too nitrogen rich in there now though, so I will have quite the stink coming out of the box in a few days. But rigorous turning should make it go away soon enough.

 

[vehve]

Temperatures are rising, the thermometer measured 22C (54F) today, and it's pretty far from the center, so I'm guessing it's close to 30C in there already. The frozen parts seem to have thawed. We cleaned a bit more poop from the animals and added that in there, but now it's pretty full again. As the temps keep rising, the pile seems to be going down though. I think I'm going to try to get all of the stuff on the right side to fit into the left side once it sets a bit lower again.

Outside temps are a couple degrees above freezing, and it should stay that way for the foreseeable future.

 

[Kusanar]

My compost just managed to peek back out from under a foot of snow, probably not very hot, but maybe not frozen solid.