Who uses their chicken compost?

[3forfree]

brucha2000, wishing4wings

You have too many rocks at home and people around here are buying them to use for landscaping.

 

[Wishing4Wings]

brucha2000, wishing4wings

You have too many rocks at home and people around here are buying them to use for landscaping.

I know! They buy them around here too! Unfortunately, mine range from golf ball to softball size, and nobody wants them. Tying to dig around here can be frustrating. That's why we've always composted, to try to build up a good layer of healthy soil without having to go down too deep.

 

[tom e]

Hey gang! Just chiming in about our compost. We don't hesitate in the least to add dog poop, meats, fats etc- or any other organic waste. I understand the concerns and they are well founded; but from my experience as long as your compost is getting HOT, and you give it a good long aging after, there can't be any harm with this. Plus, why send it off to landfills to become methane, when it can become great soil? Besides this, I think the soldier flies are knocking out the meat almost in the same day that it gets added (we have lots in the bin as well)

I know that some people are using a really fast composting practice, or they don't want the smells associated with these products- I don't say anyone is 'wrong' in anything, just different.

My practice is a three bin style composter, but I don't switch them to different bins, I just keep filling one till it's full (takes a whole season often longer) and adding our shredded waste paper and coffee grounds from starbucks to keep it HOT HOT HOT (140+ F) then when it finally gets cool, I let it age for about a year. This way I'm drawing compost for the garden from a bin that is at least a year old.

Nothing goes into our trash but celophane wrappers and little things like that. Trash can stay in the kitchen for weeks without a bit of smell.

Love reading about this stuff, I think it's almost as fun as chickens, lol.

 

[tom e]

X1000

X1000 more! I put it right under plants, no composting needed. The grass just loves it too, we get bright green spots where we've been cleaning out rabbit cage dropping pans.

 

[SunnyAlberta]

I know of people who use pine or newspaper pellet kitty litter and then compost the used litter for TWO years. I haven't tried it, but I am tempted. I do use pine pellets for my cats and chickens. I have never composted dog waste.

We don't hesitate in the least to add dog poop, meats, fats etc- or any other organic waste. I understand the concerns and they are well founded; but from my experience as long as your compost is getting HOT, and you give it a good long aging after, there can't be any harm with this. Plus, why send it off to landfills to become methane, when it can become great soil?

 

[tom e]

I know of people who use pine or newspaper pellet kitty litter and then compost the used litter for TWO years. I haven't tried it, but I am tempted. I do use pine pellets for my cats and chickens. I have never composted dog waste.

I tend to look at it like this- I already know that these materials biodegrade, nature shows us that. The question is why do folks typically recommend that we don't put it in our bins? Rather than accepting a blanket "Don't do it" recommendation, I prefer to look at the concerns with doing it and then see if I can address those concerns in another way. Best I can tell the concerns are the following:

1. bacterial/ other microbe transfer to food and therefore people who eat it. Rather than simply deciding that I won't compost dog poop, meats etc, because it may cause bacteria to grow in the bins, I simply ensure that the bins get really really hot and stay that way for weeks. The bacteria that are a concern for humans don't live very long in temperatures that my compost can reach. For example E Coli seems to be killed/ inactivated in a matter of hours at 140 deg. F. I decided to use the guidelines (a year of mesophilic activity after the ectothermic period is done) in the Humanure Handbook, since they are guidelines for composting HUMAN waste, which I would think is much more worrisome. My dogs are two miniature poodles, and the waste is going into a pretty large bin (about 4 feet x 3 feet x 2.5 feet high) so I think that's quite a small amount in the overall stuff going in. I think that time frame is way on the safe side since that's what they do for whole bins of human waste.. Besides all of this, when people cite disease transmission from fecal matter, they are usually talking about direct application of said matter, and not from the use of composted material. I think it's pretty easy to see if it's composting or not.

2. The risk of bringing pests and predators is often cited for why people don't recommend meats and fats and such. I divide the pests into two categories and answer this in two different ways.
Small pests like insects- My bin is pretty chock full of the black soldier flies (my avatar picture). They actually manage the pest flies, by secreting a hormone that pest flies can 'read' which says essentially- "don't bother laying your eggs here, there will be no food left for your larvae because we eat everything." It's said that their presence can reduce pest fly populations by 90%, and I can attest that I don't really see any at the compost. They love the coop, where I have to hang those drowning traps periodically, but they are never at the bin unless things get really out of whack. These BSF aren't pests themselves because they die after turning into flies and mating, so they won't spread disease by landing on your food, etc. Other critters in the small categorie I see are pill bugs, pincher bugs etc, that don't seem much trouble to me. At the bottom, I have LOTS of worms that are working- and it's cooler down there for them, as the new 'hot' stuff is being added to the top.
Bigger pests- rats, mice, possoms, etc, I manage by building the bin from what my friend calls "paper pallets". These are similar to other pallets, but the space between the slats are barely wide enough for a soldier fly to crawl through. If the occasional mouse gets in some way to munch on things, I haven't seen it yet- though I did have this trouble with my first built bin, as I just didn't make the joints tight enough..

3. Smell! In my experience bad smells in the compost don't have much to do with what I put in, just with how much of each thing I put in. Water- Carbon- Nitrogen. If one of the above is not in good proportion, it will stink whether it has meat or just veg. Keep it aerobic, and have a storage of Carbon materials and it should be fine. When I need a fast influx of Nitrogenous stuff, I go to starbucks and get trashbags full of used grounds.

I also don't turn anything over like most people recommend, until after the hot phase is done. Instead I build it with rougher twiggy stuff on the bottom so that air can come up. And since I'm composting as I go, I actually get many hundreds of little hot phases as I add things. I recommend visiting the bin a bunch (so I take out food waste daily) and just see how things are doing. I used to have one thermometer in the bin, but Starbucks unknowingly donated another like they keep on their steaming pitchers (in a bag of their grounds) so now I have two. I read temps, pull thermometers out, add new food waste, and then stick thermometers back in the pile. This way if things are off, I can remember what went in recently and have a better idea where the balance is off.. When a bin is done with hot phase (springtime) I switch to another (that I just emptied out for the garden) and start adding my stuff there. That bin gets a cool phase till the next spring.

I can't say that this is the best way, but it works for me. And nobody here has been sick with anything out of the ordinary (not much ordinary either) in the past two years that I've been doing it.. As for lemon peels, not only do I put them on, I typically wind up putting on trashbags full at a time, because we juice in bulk (I live amongst lemon orchards) and we freeze lemon juice to make lemonade later. I've never seen any trouble with them breaking down. It could be that the mold on them is penicillin, and that makes trouble for the beneficial bacteria in bins, but our composting happens over a great deal of time anyway, so if it is slowed down, I might never notice..

 

[Plucking farm]

I read that its good to build two or more gardens and change off each year and let your chickens roam the gardens your not using so when the next time you plant in that one they have made the soil healthy.

 

[chickenchacha]

I didn't know about the potatoes so mine have been enjoying them for years. They are all well and healthy for the record.

 

[chickenchacha]

For sure no flies here because I compost right UNDER the roosts and in the rest of the run and the chickens do all the work and eat the flies. I use lots of oak leaves and makes sure to dampen it down during the summer. From time to time I scoop the "harvest compost" out and add more leaves and a few shovels of garden soil. Never ever any odor either.

 

[oceansideangora]

For sure no flies here because I compost right UNDER the roosts and in the rest of the run and the chickens do all the work and eat the flies. I use lots of oak leaves and makes sure to dampen it down during the summer. From time to time I scoop the "harvest compost" out and add more leaves and a few shovels of garden soil. Never ever any odor either.

I am curious about this. I have a compost pile on the end of my property, that I keep a good mix of things in, but I have major problems with wild critters going after my food scraps. We have wild animals regardless on this property, and they don't bother me, but it seems rather silly to just keep feeding them our food scraps. Besides the scraps I add hay from the tortoise pen, scooped but used cat litter (it's actually chicken crumbles), and leaves and so on.

I have rabbits, and I am thinking of adding a few chickens to the rabbit yard. They could run under the cages, eat flies (they would do that - right?) keep everything mixed, and also turn compost. I am thinking that I could feed them my garden scraps.. Now, my question is - could I just move all my composting under 1 side of rabbit cages? Currently, I scrape down under the cages every month or so and add directly to my garden. It's a mix of rabbit manure, dropped alfalfa pellets, and hay. Should I add shavings to this if I add chickens? The area the hens would be in is 8X32 or so. I would still be cleaning it out every month or 2, I hate piles of poo under the cages .