The Perfect Composting System?

[nutmeg1980]

Happy Mother's Day Everyone!

My 5 hens and I are getting ready to move to a new house, and I'd like to get a really good composting system for their poop set up right away. I'd love to know if anybody has some good advise for what that might be. I use the deep litter method, I scrape the board under their roosts every week, and I turn their bedding and poo in the rest of the coop once a week. I completely clean out the coop once a year. My requirements for composting are:

- I don't have a lot of space. It's a relatively small city lot, and between the house, garage/coop, run, and garden there won't be a lot of extra space for multiple compost heaps.

- I religiously compost all of my kitchen and yard waste. I don't like the idea of stockpiling a bunch of material while I wait for a batch of compost to be done, so ideally I'd like for it to be a continuous system instead of a batch system.

- I am a gardener, so I need the chicken poo and old shavings to break down enough that I can put them on my garden in the spring.

- I don't have a ton of money to spend on a fancy composter, but I would like to get something that makes the compost easy to turn. I find that if I have to be relied on to turn it with a pitchfork every week or so it generally doesn't happen.

Any ideas? Thanks!

 

[new chick 203]

Wow, you really want allot!

So do I. I'm going through a compost bin remodel as well. Here is what I think I'm going to do. The plan is to have slated pieces that fit into the uprights for air and to let a little rain into the lower layers. I'm going to have it right next to the coop and I plan to have bird netting over the whole thing so I can put a few birds in now and again, like a chicken tractor, so they can eat the weed seeds and turn it up. I have big hopes that this is going to work well.

 

[Chris09]

Just to let you know it will take some time for wood shavings to rot down, you might consider builders sand instead of wood shavings.
Here is a inexpensive idea for a compost bin...
http://buildingblocksintupelo.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/compost20bin.jpg

Chris

 

[pokeytolman]

here is a link to some plans I found, I just built the wood and wire 3 bin this weekend. so we dont know if we like it . we did resize it to fit our space


http://www.rivcowm.org/composting/compost_build_bin.html

 

[Opa]

a link to a composter that I built for under $30 and you can't buy anything comparable for less than $300
https://www.backyardchickens.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=233&p=2444

 

[nutmeg1980]

Ooh... that is nice Opa! I was just looking around online at the compost tumblers that are available, wondering if I could get one with two barrels, or an extra barrel.... The construction of yours looks a little intimidating to me, but it's pretty simple really. Where did you find the pickle barrels?

 

[Opa]

I bought the pickle barrels at a local feed store for $15 each. It is really quite simple to make and if you decide to build one you can call me if you need advice.

 

[fiberart57]

I've made compost bins out of old pallets. I know that some of them are treated with toxic wood preserver, but many are simply hardwood and do okay.

Composting requires that the mixture stay damp in order to be heated up enough to decompose and that may be a problem inside the coop. I wonder if that in Wisconsin's hot, humid summers you may have an odor problem if you do deep litter, but I'm from the dry Rockies where deep litter is difficult.

I use wood shavings, not chips, in the coop for bedding and no poop boards. When I clean I use a kitty litter scoop and dump the waste in a row of three bins made of pallets. This takes up approximately 3'x9' of space and I rotate through. It takes about three months of chicken poo, shavings, green additions and other waste to make a decent heap here. I keep it wet with irrigation water from the Colorado River. Before I had irrigation water, I had to use treated water to keep it damp and it took a lot longer to compost because the treated water would kill the bacteria.

I'll fill the bin with waste, wet it down good and, if I'm in a hurry, cover the top with black plastic or weed barrier. I turn regularly; every three or four days. In the meantime, I'm filling another bin in which I have put a small amount of completed compost to kick start the bacteria. It's a bit like making sour dough starter but using different bins.

I've done it this way for many years and it seems to work. There are the little tumblers out there that are nifty but not very cost effective for me.

One thing I'm going to try to do this year is go and cut a bunch of the alfalfa that grows wild along the roads here and add it to the compost piles. I've heard that it gets hot quickly and has lots of nitrogen. Any ideas on that?

Mary

 

[Airilith]

Quote:
Am I missing something? That link took me to a thread about Michigan, and I didn't see anything about composting.

 

[buglit]

Try this one
http://www.doityourself.com/stry/build-a-tumbling-composter-in-3-steps