Are you wondering if you compost your chicken manure will you ever need to buy compost again?
Is that one of the benefits to keeping backyard chickens?
If you're new to gardening and composting you might be wondering do you even need to add compost
to your garden beds? Well compost if you're not too familiar it's simply just organic material,
it's the decomposed/ rotted, it could be animal waste, plants, leaves, wood chips,
and there's lots of microscopic organisms that live in in decomposition and all these little
creatures they break down the waste, the rotted decomposed organic material and when they break it
down it releases nutrients back into the soil. So if I continue to grow vegetables and flowers
and they're taking nutrients out of the soil but I never put anything back in, my soil is going to
become poor. If you're not sure what the condition of your soil is currently there's two easy ways to
tell if it's poor and needing compost. First have a look at the color, is it a light color, like as
opposed to like a nice dark brown or black, and then secondly is your soil hard when it's
dry or when it's wet? Those are two indications that your soil most likely is poor and you need
to add some organic material. In the autumn it's recommended to add two to three inches of organic
material and put that on as the top dressing and that's a good way, an easy way to get started.
Our home's garden when we moved in, it was grass lawn and we've turned it into allotment beds and
garden beds, and the soil quality was very poor after we've removed the grass. So since then
we've been slowly improving it every year and it's looking better. So if you're keeping chickens or
want to keep chickens you're wondering will your chickens create enough compost that you might
never have to purchase it again? Well it depends because it depends how many chickens you have,
how much compost do they make from their waste and whatever you add to it, and it also depends
how much of an area you want to add the compost to, how big are your garden beds
or your allotment plots, so those are two things to consider if you want to save yourself, you're
thinking will having chickens save me the purchase of having to go out and get compost brought in.
Hi I'm Beth from Garden City Chickens, weekly I make a video and write
a blog about keeping chickens in my small garden in the UK.
In my garden there are a lot of areas that I want to add compost to. The layout is we've got
a hedge border around a majority of our fencing line there's hedges growing in front of that
and then we've got like a big allotment plot in the center for vegetables and then garden
beds along the path, along some of the edges, so there's a lot of places we want to put compost.
So we do compost in our rear garden so we've got like a pallet,
a DIY pallet area where we put everything, and it's about six meters cubed or about 200 feet
cubed, and we compost in layers, so our chicken manure will go in there, we'll put our
uncooked kitchen scraps like vegetable peelings and things like that, we do leaves, flower stalks,
we do brown cardboard, brown paper, we'll shred that in our paper shredder, and then
we also own a garden waste shredder so bigger things like sunflower stalks and corn stalks,
hedge branches we''ll shred those up before adding them to the compost
because otherwise they would just, I don't think noticeably in my lifetime breakdown, well it would
take a long time, they'd be in the way all the time, so they get shredded up and put in there!
We've been keeping hen since 2016 and we currently have five hens. Now when I collect
their poo every day from the chicken coop I think I probably scoop up from the five hens
about enough to fill a two liter garden pot, and there's more waste probably than that because
they'll leave waste in the garden beds or along the path and if they poo in the garden bed I just
leave it or I'll kick some topsoil over it if it's in the summer especially to deter any flies
and if it's in the path I'll sweep that also into the garden bed and then that kind of gets
mixed up and covered in the garden soil. So the chicken manure that I scoop out of the coop and
off the patio area that's what actually gets added into the compost pile for the layers. So
we save our special chicken manure mix compost for our allotment beds because it's really good stuff
so we spread that out but we do still need to buy in compost, so there's the answer to your
question if you're wondering what we do and we buy these big 750 liter bags that come in these like
huge bags and you know it gets craned in over our hedge in our front garden and then we wheelbarrow
it back and forth from the front to the back so we'll order two of those maybe another one with
mulch for the walkway, so we do bring it in, it seems like a lot, but when you start spreading it,
it just goes down it feels like so thin over such a small area so it's deceiving I know
they look like really big bags but they don't go as far as you think once you start spreading it.
The compost we buy in is rotted farm manure, is how they advertise it,
and it comes like really hot, like once you start digging out from the center you can see
the steam and there's ash in the center, and we prefer that because it hopefully that the heated
hot compost will kill off any weed seeds maybe any parasites but there's lots of
different stuff you have like the mushroom compost sometimes we'll get that as well.
So I'm wondering do you compost your chicken manure? What do you do with it? Do you also
buy in compost for your garden on top of your chicken compost manure? Feel free to comment below
or you can send me a message! Thanks for watching and hopefully I'll see you next week, bye!