A chicken lays an egg once a day and it’s amazing if you own chickens, because you get to enjoy your home-produced organic fresh eggs. A hen produces manure of one cubic foot in six months. So, what do you plan to do with it? You cannot let manure accumulate in the coop because it tends to get stinky attracting flies and rodents and you must be careful of the ammonia because it does pose plenty of health issues.
Advantages of composting chicken manure
Don’t get all stressed out with the accumulation of chicken manure and understand that it could be your greatest asset when it comes to home gardening. If it is utilized in the right way it can be a powerful tool. You must understand that you cannot use it raw in the vegetables or flower beds because it is very strong, compose the manure and you can turn it into rich black gold. Again, if you utilize it without composting you can be sure that it will damage the roots killing the plants but if used after being composted it has the following benefits;
- When composted it is an excellent soil amendment adding organic materials along with increasing the capacity of the soil to hold water and biota
- It is also an excellent fertilizer providing potassium, phosphorus, and nitrogen to the plants. You can also use cow and horse manure
Composting manure
Always make sure that your compost pile has a balanced ratio of greens and browns, this is a thumb rule, in addition, you can follow these steps;
Accumulate bedding and manure
Many owners also utilized the bedding because it consists of straw, dry leaves, sawdust, or shavings providing a cushioning to the chickens controlling pests and odor. You can accumulate the bedding along with its manure and toss them into the bin. Many owners also prefer to collect soiled bedding and manure every day from the coop, while a few prefer to add a new bed on top of the droppings, collecting the beds less frequently.
Nitrogen to carbon balance
Do not forget the ratio you require one part nitrogen and thirty-part carbon in order to create the perfect environment for all the microbes to do their job of breaking down organic matter in order to create compost. When you’re combining chicken manure and coop bedding, how do you plan on achieving the ideal nitrogen to carbon ratio? Various beddings have a different ratio therefore the proportion will vary because it completely depends on the kind of bed being used. So, you can keep everything simple by following two parts greens to one-part browns. But keep in mind that chicken manure contains very high levels of nitrogen therefore you could be successful by utilizing a mixture of 1:1 or 1:2.
Utilizing hot composting
When you get the ratio right and then you add moisture to it and it will turn into a hot pile. The pile should have heat levels of 150 F for at least three days. In this way you can be sure that the disease-causing pathogens are destroyed. For this make sure you have a compost thermometer.
Finally, make sure that once your compost is ready, you’ll let it cure for at least two months before you can add it to your garden soil. I do hope that this will help you. All the best!