Need to learn "composting made easy"

[savingdogs]

So I have lots of animal dung...goat, rabbit, duck and chicken, and I have a garden.

But trying to figure out how to make all this poo end up as garden dirt without breaking my back is a bit daunting. I'm currently using a wheelbarrow to dump stuff on a pile where it sits a looooooooong time (rains a lot here) with everything except the rabbit poo.

The rabbit poo I've been letting get rained on first to rinse it and then putting it under the base of some raised beds I'm making. That is simple enough.

But my OTHER pile....

And the chicken poo I'm not even using, I'm just dumping it in a pile, for future use of some sort, but I'm not sure what. I don't have a rototiller to work this into the soil.

Suggestions? And I'm looking for the easy, lazy ways of doing things, I'm not particularly strong for medical reasons so I'd like to avoid some of this hoisting of wet manure around.

I also want to start a worm farm with the rabbit poo but I'm currently using it all for the garden, and I'd like to figure out how long the chicken, duck and goat fecal matter needs to decay before it is too hot to use to amend the soil.

 

[k0xxx]

I'm not sure that there is a quick and easy way. Turning your pile to aerate it will speed up the process, but it is a lot of work. For smaller amounts, a barrel type compost bin is easier to turn. Be sure to mix in a few full shovels worth of good topsoil to add the bacteria that does all the work. That will help jump start the pile. If it's raining a lot, then try putting a small tarp over the pile so that it stays moist, but not wet. Good luck.

 

[Farmfresh]

Explain to me again WHY you are making piles?

I am VERY VERY lazy and arthritic. I never make compost like other people do. For weeds, sticks, and stuff that takes a while to compost I make a little bin from a chopped up cattle panel actually in the garden row. (Sometimes a couple of them) Then I pile in the compostables for the entire season. Next year I move the bin to another area and plant something viney around the original pile, to allow it to rot down another year. On the third year I just rake it around the general area and till it in.

With horse manure, cow poo and that type of poo I use it to pile over the garden in sections nice and deep if possible at the end of the garden year. It may be in a pile until then, covered with a tarp, but I don't stir it at all. It seems to me that winter and the little rest while waiting to go on breaks it down enough for the nitrogen loving crops like my corn to use the following spring.

Goat and rabbit manure go on as a top dressing directly from the animal pens. They both need very little or no time to "cool down".

Chicken manure and other poultry manure is HOT. Since I am too lazy to properly compost it, I use that around my fruit trees, berry bushes and even some around my roses.

Also if poo is really fresh and hot you can use it as a manure tea. Simply slosh some in a 5 gallon bucket and fill with water. Allow it to "steep" a while then use the water to feed your plants.

Works for me.

Added to say - of all the manures horse seems to be the one most likely to contain weed seeds. Just be forewarned.

 

[Marianne]

I dump the chicken litter in a pile behind my garden. After a few months, I start another pile next to it. The following year I take the first pile and haul it back to the garden and just spread it around, use in flower beds, or whatever. All my kitchen scraps get tossed right out into the garden. I let the hens do the fall garden cleanup and light tilling.

I don't do true composting, nor do I ever till. Most of my garden soil is soft, friable and fertile. It was all crappy hard soil three years ago. If you google lazy gardening and no till gardening, you should get all kinds of simple info for an easy way to create good soil without having to deal with a true compost pile. JMHO

 

[savingdogs]

So more like a year to compost chicken manure pile then?

And goat poo can be put out without composting? That is good to know. I have a LOT of that. It is mixed with hay.

Maybe I just need to cover these piles with tarps and then start a new one periodically. I was thinking they needed to be rinsed out but I think they are too wet to compost.

 

[Wannabefree]

6 months on poultry poo. Goat and rabbit poo can go right in the dirt. Look up lasagna gardening That is what I plan on doing this year and from here on out.

 

[freemotion]

I have far too much compostable material to put it all right in the garden, plus I want to put compost on my lawn and on my flower gardens, and finished compost works best. Plus in my flower pots and my earthbuckets instead of buying bags of dirt (I mix it with peat moss.)

So I have a large, fenced area and wheelbarrow all the stall cleanings, leaves, garden waste, etc into basically two large outdoor box stalls. One side gets filled most of the year while the other side gets emptied (finished compost.) As soon as the finished compost side is empty, I start putting all the new stuff on that side. If I want more compost before the oldest pile is done, I just pitch the top layer over to the "new" side until I get to the good stuff beneath. I add chicken poo right in with everything else. I use deep litter so it is not an issue. Plus the hens have access to the pile and they work very hard in there, turning everything and speeding up the whole process, while shredding things with their scratching feet.

If it is too dry, I water it on occasion. If it is too wet in your area, you could cover it with a tarp part of the year.

Last summer, I spread the bedding from the kidding stalls in my veg garden paths with good results. Some oats sprouted, but they pulled easily and I enjoyed sneaking them to my favorite goats when no one else was looking. Now there are no signs of all this goat bedding in either garden. One garden had the meat chickens in it in the fall and they really tilled everything in. The poultry were fenced out of the other garden as I have garlic planted there this year, and the bedding in the paths still broke down completely. I'll be doing this again this year for sure. Still making compost, though.

 

[Farmfresh]

We get a lot of rain here. I tarp to save nitrogen. No sense letting the rain leach out my pile, plus it keeps flies down.

As for the lawn ...

When we first moved to this city lot we had tired grass that had been chemical-ed to death! At that time I was raising meat rabbits. I made plastic trays out of old split garbage cans that "rolled" all of a cages poo forward into a hanging bucket at each cages corner. I used the rabbit pee around my plants and as a "tea". I put the dried poo into a lawn fertilizer spreader and simply ran it on wide open setting over the lawn area! Worked like a charm. World probably work with clean goat "drops" as well.

 

[patandchickens]

Yeah, unless you are going for maximum nutrient-conservation efficiency or trying to set a new land-speed record, there is really no reason to put WORK into composting

Just pile the stuff up, preferably with a vaguely plausible C:N ratio of contents if you care how fast it goes, and let it sit.

Pile each kind of poo near its source, that way you don't have to haul it around til it is composted down and by then there will be a lot less OF it

If you are running out of space or have some extra energy, after a pile has sat for 6-12 months and doesn't look from the outside like it's done much at all you can go prospecting into the interior. Unless you had a really wonky C:N ratio or MAJOR dryness or sogginess problems, you will find that a bunch of the material on the *inside* of the pile is actually finished enough to use on the garden.

(You can estimate how much useful stuff there will be by how much the pile has shrunken -- this is why it is useful to do separate piles thru time, or an advancing windrow, since you don't want to be CONTINUALLY throwing new stuff on top of old stuff if you don't have a good means of turning or excavating the pile)

So you shovel out the usable stuff and do <whatever> with it, then the outer layers that really did not compost well because they were too exposed can be left in that location and you start a new pile on top of them. Lather rinse repeat.

As others have said, rabbit and goat poo can go more or less directly on the garden, although for food crops (especially greens) you want to think about your personal philosophy regarding fecal-bacteria contamination, everyone has their own take on this.

I couldn't even tell you offhand how many compost piles I have -- let's see, there is the manure shed for the horses, the little outdoor pile also from the horses, the sheep have been accumulating waste-hay-and-droppings deep pack over the winter that I will herd into an actual pile in a few months and then probably use on the garden in the fall or maybe sooner if I run out of stuff to hill up potatoes with; there are two old poultry-cleanings piles plus a newer one in the horse pasture (am having rat problems from poultry compost so close to poultry house); and there is the garden compost pile and the "things I don't want in the compost pile" pile (the latter I will never *use* but am hoping to build up a bit of a berm against flooding). Oh, plus I put garden stuff into the chicken pens and remove it once a year or so to the garden, so that is actually composting too in a way.

I still have to move the finished compost to wherever I want to use it (although the furthest stuff, the horse compost, mostly goes back onto the pasture, by hand) -- but there is a lot less OF it once its finished composting so to me it makes more sense to move it THEN

Good luck, have fun,

Pat

 

[savingdogs]

I think what I really need is to put the tarps over the pile I have and start new ones. You guys have given me some good ideas. I didn't think to start new piles either, I thought I had to DO something with this pile I have. And maybe just letting the chicken poo sit where I have isn't so sloppy as I was thinking, I just need to cover it when it is so rainy! Somehow protecting a pile of poo from rain never occurred to me. Poor tarp will be so nasty afterward....it will be its permanent job!

I do live on a steep hill and the animals are downhill from the house and garden. I hope to create a second garden down below the animal areas, but the goats need to clear it first. That is where my piles are and hauling the compost back up the hill to the garden isn't fun, but I think I just need to create paths and then wait for the compost to be dry to move it up. So it will have to be a seasonal thing.

We are essentially living in rain forest and everything is moldy and decaying all the time, the whole hill is one big compost heap, but a wet one! We do have about three or four basicaly dry months. I see I'll be busy then!

I was thinking of creating some cobblestone areas in the summer in the highest traffic areas when the weather is nice, too. I did that at my last house with just stone and mud and it looked nice, but was a lot of work.