Process Chicken Manure
An average sized hen produces 1 cubic foot of manure every 6 months. This manure can sit around and stink up your chicken coop, or you can use to enrich your soil for healthy, high-yield plants. The oldest recipes for compost involve mixing animal manure with rotted hay for a nitrogen-rich blend that plants thrive in. Raw chicken manure can burn your plants at the roots if it is not first decomposed. However, once you process this manure by turning it into compost, it makes a highly useful soil amendment. Does this Spark an idea?
Instructions
1. Collect chicken bedding, shredded leaves and newspaper into an area where you will form a compost pile. These items are carbon-rich browns that will help the nitrogen rich chicken manure to break down faster.
2. Layer chicken manure with the brown organic material to form a compost pile. Your compost pile should be approximately 5 feet wide by 5 feet deep by 5 feet high. A pile of this ratio will create hot compost and break down faster.
3. Wet your pile so that it is the consistency of a wrung out sponge.
4. Allow the compost pile to heat to an internal temperature of 130 to 150 degrees F. This temperature is hot enough to kill internal pathogens in your compost and to speed decomposition of the compost. Check this internal temperature using a compost thermometer.
5. Turn the pile using a garden fork to keep the internal temperature high. To do this, bring the center material in the pile to the outer edges, and the outermost material to the center. The internal temperature should stay above 130 degrees F. You will need to turn the pile approximately every 3 days.
6. Once every part of the pile has been heated for approximately 3 days, cover the pile and let it decompose naturally over a period of 60 days. This process is known as curing.
Tags: compost pile, internal temperature, break down, break down faster, chicken manure, down faster, form compost