Realllllllly Hot Cooking Compost!

[Nifty-Chicken]

I've been doing deep litter method and decided it was about time to clean it out and replace with some new shavings.

So, on Thursday (2 days ago) I took all the poopy shavings, got them wet and mixed them with some cool compost. I mixed it all up and let it sit. I wasn't expecting much to happen since last time I did this nothing exciting happened.

Well, I went out today to check on it and when I stuck a pitchfork inside I saw steam. I grabbed my thermometer and stuck it in to see this:

Well, the good news is that my poopy shavings should turn to compost much faster than I expected. The bad news.... all the tons of worms my chickens were looking forward to eating are probably cooked and/or moved out of the compost.

 

[silkiechicken]

Haha, yeah, that's what compost does. Make sure you don't end up with a small fire now. At school we've had the compost by the green house almost catch fire before. Just keep it mixed.

 

[CarriBrown]

If you really want it to heat up, throw some horse manure in there! But yeah, SC is right... Keep it mixed so you don't have a fire!!!