Chicken Compost

In preparation for spring time and our soon to be baby chicks, we took a bit of time this past weekend to start constructing our second compost!

We spent all summer gathering up pine, oak and cottonwood logs and are now left with an extraordinary amount of bark. Additionally, our beautiful oaks are heavily shedding their leaves and collecting these leaves is an everyday job — if we want to see any part of our backyard’s flagstone patio space.😆

While we have been utilizing our original compost primarily for food waste, we are in the process of developing a second compost, which will be home to all of fall’s oak leaves, summer’s scrap bark and our chicky manure. We envisioned that it would be a very simple process of utilizing our chicken’s manure to feed our farm, but have come to find with more research that the process is a leetle more extensive than dreamed. While a very valuable and free resource, fresh chicken manure is high in nitrogen and can literally burn and kill plants if applied directly. In order to alleviate harm and turn this wonderful source of fertilizer into a risk-free resource, it requires at least 4-6 weeks to break down if employing the hot composting method and a year if practicing the cold composting method. Hot composting calls for heating the manure at at least 130 degrees for at least 15 days to break down any materials that could potentially contaminate.

For now, we plan to cold compost in our second compost. We are getting the compost heavy with all of the carbon nutrient rich scraps from the bark, wood scraps and litter leaves so when we start layering on the nitrogen rich chicken manure, the compost will be at a great ratio of 2:1 respectively.

It’s all coming together, and we couldn’t be more stoked for our second compost!

-❤️ Seal + Dove