Composting is easy. All you have to do is collect "green" and "brown" materials and layer them. Then, depending on how fast you want your humus, you water it and turn it (for the fastest results) or let it sit and let Old Mother Nature take care of it (this can take a year or more). Your chicken poo and the pine shavings are excellent for accelerating the process.
So what is "green" and what is "brown"? "Green" stuff is materials that are moist and are high in nitrogen: your chicken poo, kitchen trimmings, fresh weeds from the garden and lawn clippings. Also, ironically, coffee grounds are "green". "Brown" stuff is the stuff that's dry and high in carbon: dried leaves, desiccated vines, sticks, cardboard & paper, those pine shavings.
Things that accelerate the process are breaking the stuff that goes on your pile into the smallest possible pieces, keeping the pile moist (not wet, but moist), letting air circulate through it, keeping a ratio of 20-30 times more carbon than nitrogen, keeping the temperature up around 115˚ as much as you can. Turning your pile will keep the population of bacteria and beasties evenly spread through all the materials in your pile. Turn your pile when it's cooled down. When it's hot, leave it alone.
What do you NOT put in your compost pile: anything that you've sprayed with a poison (though I grow veggies in oleander that's been composted), anything with a soil-borne pathogen like fusarium and other tomato wilts and blights, bones, meat, oily or greasy waste, truly noxious weeds you don't ever want to see again. I live in any area infested with nutsedge. I wouldn't wish that stuff on my worst enemy so that all goes in the trash!
Now, that said, I've been composting for 20 years or more. I don't pay a damned bit of attention to most of that fussiness. I do what's called passive composting. Everything I've got from my kitchen, yard and gardens goes into an active pile and when the pile is broken down into black humus I dig it out and put it in the garden beds. I can do it this way because I keep 4 big piles going all the time so how long the newest pile takes is of little concern to me.
A couple other tips I'd pass along is assess your yard and your needs when you locate the pile. You don't want it too close to your house or too close to neighbors. A compost pile WILL attract rodents. They're opportunists and it's inevitable but if they're far away from the house you don't need to see them and they don't need to try to get inside when they can burrow into the warmth and nutrition of a compost pile. That's why you don't want your pile too close, now, that said, everything that comes from your kitchen, garden, flower beds, lawn and coop should go on the pile and the humus needs to go out to your garden and beds. So look for someplace that you won't mind trekking out to every few days. Also, the bigger the pile is, the more heat it can generate and the more efficient it will be at destroying weeds and disease and making those rodents uncomfortable.
All of my piles are at least 5'x3'x4'. At least they build to that size before they break down into something more like 4 1/2' x 2 1/2' x 2'. The cute little composting containers you can buy have minimal capacity and really produce mulch rather than humus. But there's nothing wrong with mulch either. Finally, you don't need anything expensive or fancy to contain a pile. It can be merely a pile or have 3 sides fashioned from pallets or be surrounded by heavy plastic or rest against 2 walls of a cement or cinderblock fence. You'll find lots of ideas online if you google "composting".
Above all, keep in mind that this is nature's purifying and recycling method. And you'll get the best soil you'll ever see -- INFINITELY superior to anything you can get in a sack at the nursery -- from stuff you're throwing away.
I never though of putting it in the run, though. Curious how to implement this method!
