The Snowflakes are doing great in the front yard despite the fact that I’m a clueless city girl. I’m learning more and more which means more and more questions but mostly I’ve been operating under the premise that Ignorance is Bliss.
I bought another composter last month to handle all the chicken coop poop. 1. Chicken poop definitely piles up. 2. Chicken poop is stinky. 3. Chicken poop is stinkier when it’s been in the pile for a while. 4. Chicken poop makes a compost pile really “hot.”
Whaaaaaaaat?!
This is where the ignorance part comes in. I was stirring the compost pile around and realized that the pile was REALLY hot in the middle. And I mean REALLLLLY hot. Then I started to worry. How hot is too hot? Could a fire start spontaneously? There goes my bliss!
After Googling ‘Compost Fire’ and reading about spontaneous combustion, I decided that I needed to deal with the compost pile out there with the girls. I emptied out the compost bin and found a pile of ash from the middle! No wonder the pile was hot – it had been smoldering in there! Oooopsie!
I filled up five recycle tubs that I placed together in a square. Once I filled them up I moved the chicken cage over on top of them so they can age for a while. I read that it takes about 90 days to mellow out the chicken manure and kill the bacteria so I’ll just leave those piles alone until at least July 1st. Hopefully, smaller piles translates into less combustible.
The girls seem to be thriving despite me!
All's well that ends well....
Tagged as:
chicken manure,
chicken poop,
Composting,
urban chickens
It’s been awhile since we talked about composting. I don’t think much about it, it just seems to be incorporated in my daily life. I’ve got two big bins in the front yard, and a little composter just outside the kitchen door. The word “composting” seems to be a scary thing for lots of people. Basically, it’s not a big deal if you follow a few basic rules. You need green products (kitchen scraps like rinds, tops, cores, grass clippings, green leaves -anything that breaks down and doesn’t contain meat or fat products.) To offset the green products, you need to add brown products (dried leaves, paper, cardboard, straw and wood chips). Too much green and you’ll end up with a stinky mess. Too much brown and it won’t break down as quickly. Eggshells and coffee grinds are excellent things to add to your pile. Common sense dictates that the smaller your pieces are, the faster the breakdown.
Keep in mind that you don’t want to compost plant material that has been sprayed with herbicides. It will remain in the compost and kill plants if you spread it around the garden. Also, weeds can be composted, BUT only if they have dried out and have not gone to seed.
I practice vermiculture, which means I cultivate worms which, in turn, compost my kitchen waste products. My end product isn’t just compost, it’s worm castings. Gold for the garden. Remember, too, if you are raising worms, their mouths are small, so crushing eggshells and chopping their food into small pieces is a courtesy they will appreciate. Aren’t they cute?!
The Kids
I have been composting shredded paper mixed into my bins for awhile. My latest success story is a by-product of my bird feeders. The birdseed I use is black sunflower seed and I am going through a bag a day, so that translates into a lot of hulls I rake up weekly. With a layer of sunflower hulls in the compost bins, the worms have multiplied exponentially, which means they are really chomping through the stuff I through in; i.e. faster turnaround. Is it wrong to be so excited about that? 
Tagged as:
Composting,
vermiculture
I opened up my compost bin the other day to dump some stuff in and this is what I found.
I raked up all the loose black sunflower seeds hulls under my bird feeders and dumped them in the compost a couple of weeks ago. I know there were some undisturbed seeds in all those hulls and apparently they’ve all sprouted! I stirred the top of the pile around a bit and discovered that the worms LOVE it! Sunflower seed mulch. Who knew?!
Tagged as:
compost bin,
Composting,
sunflower seeds,
worm bin
