How to determine quality of different types of compost?

[Red-Stars-in-RI]

That's just great. If I lived closer to town, and/or had more chickens to feed, I would probably look into getting waste food too. But I only have 10 chickens and going into town and back with the pickup costs me about $4.00 per trip. I currently spend less than $10 on commercial feed per month, so running the pickup into town to get "free" waste food would not make sense for me. We feed kitchen scraps to our chickens and they love it. So I do what I can with what makes dollar sense in our situation. Dear wife and I like the idea that the chickens eat our kitchen scraps, making it into eggs and compost, and it also saves us garbage bags heading to the landfill.

Yeah, 8 weeks ago I had 25 hens or so. I now have closer to 75-80 (with about 55 chicks about ready to start coming out to play), and my pickup location is about a 15 min ride. On a good pickup, I'd have a pickup truck bed full of food waste - which really makes a dent in commercial feed intake.

The beauty of chickens, food waste, and compost, is you can do it on any scale....4 chickens, 40, 80, 800...

 

[gtaus]

UPDATE 19 OCT 2020: Well, we have had snow the past few days with only more snow in the forecast. Days never rising above freezing temps. Looks like I might be done harvesting any more chicken run compost this year. All in all, I got about 42 cubic feet of compost from my wood chip pile and the chicken run litter. I was able to fill up my raised beds before the snow fell, so I guess I can't complain. Still, winter is about 4 weeks too early. If we get a few days of warm weather I might be able to get back into the chicken run and harvest more compost. If not, I guess I'll have to wait till spring clean out.

 

[Legamin]

Absolutely what goes into the pile determines the finished quality of the finished compost. The composted wood chips will not be a good growing medium because it won't have the nutrients to stimulate and promote growth. It will definitely improve soil by holding water and preventing compaction. The composted run material will make a superior finished soil with adequate N, Ca, P, K micro and macro minerals to promoted a robust garden. You can always run a soil test on the finished product to see what you are working with If you are battling serious soil deficiencies.

I do disagree gently with the wood chips not being a good soil composting material. There are 3 primary benefits to wood chips that are often overlooked. First they take a long time to break down so you can cover a 1 acre garden in 4 -6 inches of wood chips raw..no composting.. for killing weeds and indigenous grasses. They hold the moisture so that irrigation is unnecessary except in drought conditions. You wait one year then dig through the layer to find moist black soil waiting for you and the first 1/2” or so of the wood chips well composted and feeding the soil. Dig your rows and plant in this and when the sprouts form to 3” or so cover the row with existing wood chips that you pushed aside to plant to retain moisture. This is especially great for trees..yes fruit trees too..just keep the tops of the roots exposed so beetles and mold cannot get started on the trunk!
I use 1 layer of chips (large chips from a big log chipper) for the first three years. Then i add compost from the barn cleanings an household vegetable matter layered with the 1 or so tons of shredded cardboard and paper that finds it’s way into our lives from advertisers and Amazon every year. We produce 3-4 tons of rich compost per year and have 4 piles of this size going at any given time. No turning, no watering, just chickens to scratch and aerate and poop..which adds the needed acidity to accelerate the composting. Then use a loader to fill my pickup and fork it onto the fields as rich black soil. I hold the chicken coop poop and litter aside..that is a special blessing! I pack giant women’s nylon stockings with about 300lbs of coop miasma and soak it for a week in the hot sun in a 300 gallons tank. using ‘hot’ manure this creates a superb nitrogen rich liquid that I pump through a 12’ liquid fertilizer spreader i built for about $160.00 and mounted on a trailer behind my old tractor. This is my Spring fertilizer that goes on after the final thaw which occurs about 3 months after my frost planting. I use nature and an old truck battery to do the fertilizing that used to cost thousands! I can lay that liquid down every 6 weeks during Spring/Summer/Fall once i lay the poo pile compost solids on immediately after the first thaw. I used to spend over $3500 in fertilizer and fuel etc. to do what I do for the cost of fuel alone now. the wood chips are not for the pasture but for the acre of garden. by maintaining the hedges, brush and trees on the property I never have a lack of wood chips! It all has to go somewhere so I just find where it fits and works the hardest!
For sure there is at least 6 ways to ’correctly’ do everything! This is what works for me. When you add various climate and soil factors into the mix you an take that ‘6’ and multiply by a factor of 20 and we are STILL all doing it CORRECTLY! Use your local Ag program undergrads and Doctoral candidates as a resource. They will spend their own money to get data from you if you take their recommendations seriously (which, admittedly, you can’t always do 100% of the time) but this is a resource that can save you lab fees an chemical licensing fees by the thousands! I’m on just 10 acres but my yield is better than my neighbor’s 34 acres from which he feeds his alpacas…i think he’s coming around!

 

[gtaus]

For sure there is at least 6 ways to ’correctly’ do everything!

Yep, there appear to be many ways to run a successful system. Although I just have small raised garden beds, I have a number of different ways of growing my food and some are more successful than others. I have what I would call 1) normal raised beds, 2) hügelkultur raised beds, and 3) elevated sub-irrigated raised beds.

This year we had a terrible drought all summer long. Essentially, we had no rainfall from about mid-May till the last week of August. Normally, I mow my lawn twice a week throughout the summer months. This year, I stopped mowing about mid-May and only now have started mowing the lawn - mostly to get the leaves that are falling on the ground. Anyway, no natural rainfall this summer.

In my main garden this year, without a sprinkler system to water the plants, the "normal" raised beds dried up very fast and almost nothing produced. My hügelkultur raised beds in the main garden produced food most of the summer, but dried up sometime mid-August. The difference between the hügelkultur and non-hügelkultur raised beds was almost like night and day and the wood base in the hügelkultur raised beds held on to water for most of the summer.

I built some new hügelkultur raised beds in my backyard, by the chicken coop, and they got water from my house sprinkler every other day. Those new hügelkultur raised beds exploded with produce. Just goes to confirm how vital water is to all living plants.

I planted beans in my elevated sub-irrigated planters. They are like raised beds, up on legs to make them waist high, and they have a reservoir of water in the bottom of the planter holding about 15 gallons of water. In a "normal" summer, with rainfall maybe once or twice a week, I have had to refill these sub-irrigated planters maybe 3 or 4 times for all summer. This summer, with our drought, I was refilling the sub-irrigated planters 2-3 times per week. But the bean plants exploded with produce and I could not have been more happy with the results.

I used my chicken run compost in all my raised beds, but without water, nothing grows even in good material. I have lots of wood chips, leaves, and grass clippings in my chicken run compost. As it ages in the chicken run, it turns into black gold. Having said that, I found out that even the best growing material is not good enough unless you have water for the plants. This year's drought taught me some valuable lessons in my garden failures, and successes in my growing methods.