How to determine quality of different types of compost?

[gtaus]

I would not dig the soil out and start over unless your plants are showing signs of disease. It still has good texture it just doesn't have the nutrients to feed the plants. You can't take take take and not replace and have productive beds. Every tomato you pick removes x amount of nitrogen. You need to replace the N for continued growth. You still have time this year. Make some compost tea out of fresh chicken poop. Add it to one bed (not root vegetables) and measure your results.

OK. It would be easier on me just to amend the raised bed soil mix with fresh compost, work it in with a cultivator, and then top it off with some mulch. My plants are not showing any signs of disease, they just did not grow very well.

 

[gtaus]

Pictures, please!

First, a couple pictures of my chicken run compost experiment:

Here you can get an good idea of how deep my chicken run compost litter. I put an 18 inch high board at the gate to keep the litter from blocking the door. The litter is actually a little higher than 18 inches in some places, and down to about 12 inches in others where the chickens have dug holes.

I don't imagine you can see, but the chicken run is loaded with wood chips, leaves, and grass clippings. Whenever we have kitchen scraps, I just throw it into the run for the chickens to eat, or scratch into the litter. I used to just put kitchen scraps in the pallet compost bin I put in the chicken run, but now the whole chicken run is essentially a compost system.

It might not look like the most ascetically pleasing chicken run, but it never smells, never gets muddy, and I'm making lots of compost for the gardens.

As to my cement mixer converted to a compost sifter....

Here is the sifter in action. You can see I took a normal cement mixer and attached a barrel to sift the cement. I had an old plastic half barrel which I cut in half again, using the bottom of the plastic barrel to attach to the cement mixer, added some wire for the sifting, and used the upper part of the plastic barrel to make a ring to keep the wire from getting out of shape.

I have one dump cart under the sifter to catch the sifted compost (using 1/4 inch hardware cloth), and the other cart is collecting the larger wood chips that are not yet composted. I am throwing those larger wood chips into the chicken run to mix with the litter. It helps to balance out all the grass clippings I have been dumping into the run.

Here is a closeup of how I attached the sifting barrel to the cement mixer. The turnbuckles can be taken off to remove the sifter and you can use the cement mixer as a cement mixer.

Here is a closeup of the finished compost I get after sifting it through the 1/4 inch hardware cloth. This is only compost from a pile of arborist wood chips (includes bark, leaves, etc...) and not from my chicken run. I have not yet tried to sift any compost from my chicken run.

Here is a shot of the wood chips too large for the sifting. They work themselves out of the sifting barrel and fall into the second cart. I am dumping them into the chicken run, but you could also just throw them back on a compost pile and let them age some more.

The first day it took about 20 minutes for me to shift 6 cubic feet of finished compost using this cement mixer compost sifter. Using my old manual sifter made from 2x4's and hardware cloth would have taken me hours. This is so much easier.

It rained last night, and today I sifted some of the wood chips. Being "damp", I found the wood chip compost was sticking to the 1/4 inch hardware cloth and I had to smack the wire every once in a while to clear it so it would sift. So, today, that 20 minute job took me about 30 minutes to get a full cart of finished compost. Even so, for me, that is well worth it.

 

[Acre4Me]

WIW @gtaus !! Thanks for the pics!! Your sifter is great!! Very ingenious set up -I love it!! The chicken run is also doing well with all that material.

 

[Sally PB]

WOW! My garden plants envy your garden plants!
Awesome setup.

 

[gtaus]

WIW @gtaus !! Thanks for the pics!! Your sifter is great!! Very ingenious set up -I love it!! The chicken run is also doing well with all that material.

I got the idea for the cement mixer/compost sifter from YouTube videos. No credit for me on that idea. However, instead of drilling holes on the side of the cement mixer drum to mount a buckle, I used eye bolts where the two halves of the drums come together instead. I think the eye bolts work even better than drilling into the cement mixer drum, and, if I ever want to sell the mixer, I can easily unbolt the eye bolts and reinsert the original flat head bolts the mixer came with.

There are many reasons to have chickens. One of the main reasons I got chickens was to make compost for the garden, and the eggs are just a bonus. I am looking forward to cleaning out the chicken run litter later this fall and running it through my new sifter. Hope I will be getting some nice compost. If nothing else, I'll use it as mulch on the garden beds.

 

[gtaus]

WOW! My garden plants envy your garden plants!
Awesome setup.

Well, not yet. My garden is really suffering from poor soil conditions which is why I am making this chicken run compost system and wood chips compost. I hope to start adding the compost to the garden later this fall.

Maybe your garden plants can be jealous next year, but I'm sure they have bragging rights for this year.

I really do like this cement mixer/compost sifter setup. I cannot believe how much finished compost I can sift in such little time, and little effort. And, by the way, I just turned the big 60, so I look for ways to get the work done with less stress on the body.

 

[Sally PB]

I hear you! I'm 58 now and feel every bit of it some days. Other days, well, a bit younger in some areas, and a bit older in others. It balances out.

I have very sandy soil in one garden, and heavy clay in another. It's nice that compost helps both. We'll have to compare notes next summer.

 

[ChocolateMouse]

That's a real nice compost sifter setup.
Like the others have said, the only way to determine the quality of compost is with an NPK+ analysis. You can probably test macronutrients with an NPK/PH test from a store, but to really test micronutirients you need a lab. Compost quality will 100% vary based on what's in it.

For that fine wood chip compost, I would mix that in at the end of the fall season and yes, till it into the top few inches of soil for more rapid results. It will drain nitrogen from the soil for a couple months but since it's the end of the season it shouldn't matter. Don't fertilize 'til after you do this.

The reason being if your soil is sandy, fertilizer won't DO much for you. It will just wash away. You need biomass. Biomass looks like carbon sources that hold water and nutrients, and the microorganisms that live on it. That's what really feeds your plants. If you have a lot of biomass, it will retain the nutrients in the biomass and the microorganisms will feed it to the plants. That aged wood chip dust is perfect for it. Bugs love it, bacteria loves it, fungus loves it, it gets spongy and wet, it's good stuff just not very nutrient dense. But it COULD be if you give it some time in the soil and THEN fertilize. You could have the perfect mix of sand, silt and clay and it could STILL be bad soil if you have no biomass. Think forest floors.

The stuff that comes out of the chicken pen will be richer but also serve a similar purpose.

 

[gtaus]

Just wanted to add, I posted a few pictures of the composting chicken run not because I expect most people will want a chicken run that looks like mine, but because it's an experiment I'm trying to create much needed compost for my garden. I see pictures and videos of chicken coops and runs that look better maintained than the main house. I know some people are outside cleaning every chicken dropping while it's still warm.

But that is not me. From the time I started thinking about getting some backyard chickens, I was determined to see if I could put them to use making compost for me. I have been dumping just about everything organic and compostable into the chicken run. I even shred old newspapers and cardboard as much as possible so they no longer get sent to the landfill. I have cut down on the amount of stuff we send to the landfill by more than half. So I like to think that I am doing all of us a favor while at the same time creating great compost that I can use in my garden.

I calculated that my 10X10 chicken run, filled with on average 16 inches of litter, is composting 133 cubic feet of compost. The compost here in the big box stores costs about $5.00 per bag of 1 cubic foot of material. So I am thinking I have just over $600 of potential compost sitting out there in my backyard. And I know there is no "garbage" in that material like you sometimes get with store bought compost. No plastics or metals in my chicken compost.

Anyway, point is, when I look at that chicken run composting system, I see a thing of beauty.

 

[ChocolateMouse]

Rest assured, my chicken pen looks just like yours. Brown wood chips, dry leaves, cut grass and weeds, dead plants. They love it and it NEVER smells.