Friday, June 5, 2015

Poop, it's everywhere!

That's right, poop is everywhere in our tiny urban farm. And over the last few years we have come up with a pretty good system for cycling organic matter into poop and then into organic matter again. So let's talk poop.

First off I want to say that having chickens has really changed the way we deal with our kitchen waste because let me tell you, chickens will eat just about anything!


Into this humble container on our counter goes all our kitchen waste. This includes coffee grounds, yucky lettuce, onion skins, the crusts of sandwiches that my toddler absolutely refuses to eat no matter what goodness is on the rest of the bread, and everything in between. And, ready for this? Other chicken's bones and anything meat-like. Remember hearing that birds roughly descended from dinosaurs? Well, they will happily eat each other under the right circumstances without any hesitation.


(They will also catch and eat mice. See that mouse tail? Bet you'll never look at chickens in quite the same way again.)

So each day, one of us dumps the bucket into the coop for the ladies. Now, they don't eat some things, like coffee grounds. But they do dig through it and pick out what they want and this keeps happening every day, all day long, this digging. All those articles about turning your compost to get it to decompose faster? Momma aint got time for that, so I let the chickens do it for me. In the meantime, they are also pooping all over the place and digging that in, too, so it becomes a very hot mess. And by hot mess, I mean FULL of nitrogen and way too 'hot' to put on the garden or use directly, not to mention full of bacteria that's dangerous to have on things your going to eat. (Salmonella outbreaks on spinach from animal waste?)

So twice a year, my awesome husband digs it all out of there back down to the dirt (or so, it's not scientific at all) and it goes into one of those dumb round plastic round compost bins someone gave us a few years ago. In theory, your supposed to turn this compost, how? I have no idea, but we just let the hot mess rest in there for a full season. While it's in there getting rained, snowed and sunned on, the nitrogen amount leaches out some and it becomes safe for plants. Also, it magically fills with worms that come from...well, I don't have an answer for that, but they get in there.



From there, it goes into these awesome stack- able bins. This way, when it's ready, I don't need a forklift or husband to move it around. I just remove one from the stack and take it where I want to put it. Sometimes I dig it in and sometimes I don't bother and just top-dress. That cycle takes about a year for chicken waste to become safe and wonderful for plants. By the time it's done, it does not stink at all and we do screen it to get out the big twigs and bits that are too big to do well.

(An old crib mattress covered with hardware screen and secured with zip-ties works great. We dump in on in shovels full and push it back and forth across the screen with a rake into another of these bins.)

Then we got rabbits, and believe me, that changed the whole equation around here. If you've never experienced how much poop 3 adults rabbits can make along with their offspring, it's pretty amazing. And here's the real beauty of it. While they are much more sensitive to freshness and toxins than chickens, in the warm months thay eat a lot from our yard, maybe as much as 50% of their diet. Plus their manure is so mild, no resting period is required, it can go directly on the garden!

I researched on Pinterest, and this blog Rise and Shine Rabbitry, what kinds of organic matter is OK for bunnies. From my garden they get: mint, dill, parsley, french sorrel, lettuce, grass, raspberry and blackberry leaves and canes and twice daily clippings from my willow, which they eat leaves, twigs and all.

We set up this collection system under the main hutch to make it easier.



Another example of the way I started using their manure is in one of my raised beds. Last winter we turned this into a hoophouse and the bunnies spent the winter in it in their cages. When spring came, I pulled off some of the 12 inch layer of manure mixed with bedding straw and covered my front vegetable patch. But the rest we just left right where it was in the raised bed and I planted seeds right into it with great success.






You can see at the edges of this picture that we have left the frame of the hoophouse up since we plan to house bunnies in here again for next winter. I'm using it to trellis beans on for now and it just makes less work to take it down and put it back up all the time.


It's pretty clear that the greens in this picture: mustard, spinach, lettuces, chard and some Bull's Blood beets are very much enjoying this layer of composted manure to grow in. The jury is still out about how other, less nitrogen hungry crops like tomatoes and peppers, will like this, but I think winging it has proved fairly successful so far for us.


So until next time, keep winging it and enjoy summer!