The nutrients in chicken manure are roughly 1.1-0.8-0.5 and the paper has none, so what do you expect the compost might have. You only get from compost what you put in and you need a greater variety of material, ie. more vegetative waste.

kimmq is kimmsr

kimmq

Thank you. That is helpful. I figured the chicken manure is high in nitrogen and the paper is high carbon. What else should I be looking for?

All my ginger is dying right now. Maybe I can clip that all up and throw it in as well.

"Hot" composting can be difficult to achieve in winter. I'd add a bunch of 'greens' (high N) to heat things up quickly and keep the pile turned.

@Don, you mention that what you rake up will probably include a fair bit of soil. I've found soil in compost makes it very unlikely the pile will 'heat up.' You may have to live with cold composting (nothing wrong with that) if the soil is already mixed in.

Make sure each pile of ingredients is nicely moist before it is added to the mix.

This is stating the obvious (sorry) but us composters can get carried away with enthusiasm and decide that the pile will sizzle no matter what we do. And I have shown myself that sodden X added to dry Y does not produce moist Z. It produces sodden X and still dry Y. Very annoying when you inspect later.

Of course, freshly pulled green weeds or freshly cut grass does not need wetting.

You'll have plenty of nitrogen with your chicken manure, but be aware that "hot" composting usually requires a pretty big pile that provides a lot of insulation. Eight chickens may not do that for you. But you'll certainly get "warm" composting!

Also, don't worry about "nutrients" in compost. At least in the short run, that's not what compost is for. Even the best compost is not all that nutrient rich. The purpose of compost is mainly to increase soil tilth and friability.

Depending on where in the world you are shredded leaves, the ginger plants and any other plant material from the garden, any once living plant material would add needed nutrients. Plants need, from the soil, Nitrogen, Phosphorus, Potash, Calcium, and Magnesium, as macro nutrients and Iron, Cobalt, Manganese, Chlorine, Boron, Copper, Molybdenum, Nickel, Zinc, and some others and these would be in the rest of what you put into the mix.

While a number of people take the idea expressed above the nutrients in compost are many as many of us have found over the years as the nutrient supply in our soil has increased without the addition of any other nutrient source. However, this depends on the quality of the compost you make and that requires a larger mix of material other than manure and paper.

Perhaps this article might be of some interest.

http://www.todayshomeowner.com/what-nutrients-can-be-found-in-compost/

kimmq is kimmsr

Plants do get nutrients from compost, but rather little. All the nitrogen that comes from compost comes from long-term degradation of "organic" sources of nitrogen in it. Proteins that don't break down readily. So putting compost in your soil doesn't provide any kind of a "quick hit" for nitrogen. (Unlike uncomposted manure!) The idea that finished compost is "rich" in plant-usable nitrogen is demonstrably false. Yes, compost may contain some micronutrients and, if your soil really needs them, it might help. Most soils don't.

Try this

https://www.planetnatural.com/composting-101/soil-science/myths/

But the short term value of compost is, like I said, tilth and friability. Most native soils are lacking in that far more than nutrients.

Maybe the disagreement here is about "nutrients" versus "fertilizer". Compost is definitely not the latter, and a minor contributor of the former.

This is an interesting discussion and very helpful. I'm rethinking what I want to accomplish here. The main thing is that I want to get this area, where the chickens were, ready to plant for the spring, with as little work as possible. :) I also need to get rid of this big bag of shredded paper.

I do need some soil tilth and friability, So I'm going to mix the paper in with as much chicken manure as I can and see what happens. It may heat up, it may not. I probably do not have enough material for that. As for the time of year, I'm on the Mississippi gulf coast, so we have very mild winters. Its in the 70s right now.

If the hot compost doesn't work, maybe the worms will do what I need. I do have some worm bins and they seem to make shredded paper disappear pretty quickly. Maybe they will do the same thing in the corner of this raised bed, but my bins also have a lot of coffee grounds.

The biggest thing I learned here is that I need to read some more about adding nutrients into the soil, since my presupposition that compost does it was erroneous. I love this forum.

Slow composting is just as good at making compost, it just takes a little longer. I'm starting to think that's better in terms of retaining nitrogen anyway.

One thing I wanted to say about your chicken manure is that if it's been there on the ground up to a year, it is no longer 'fresh'. In other words it has already done some decomposing in place, as well as being leached out by rain. It's certainly great as a compost ingredient but it may not be as 'hot' as 100% fresh manure would be. If you went to a chicken farm and got a truckload of stuff no more than a couple days old, it would be a whole different ballgame.

The best way to figure out composting this stuff is to make up a pile, observe and adjust. If it gets hot, great. If it doesn't do much at all, you needed more greens. Observe and adjust. Try it out and see how it goes.

Correct. Slow/merely warm composting is great. The value of hot composting is that it kills weed seeds and, presumably, biological pathogens that might be in the manure. Paper is fine. It will just take longer to compost, since the paper contributes almost no nitrogen. The composted paper won't lead to much in the way of nutrients, but it'll make a fine soil structure amendment.

Agreed about "fresh" manure. The way manure gets a compost pile cranking is with a shot of nitrogen. That nitrogen comes from hydrolysis of urea and production of ammonia. That's a gas, and will eventually escape, if not bound up in soil. Urea is a major component of urine, which manure is soaked in. Once wet (as in urine or manure), the urea only lasts a week or two. So old manure has little nitrogen potency, and won't make a hot pile. It hasn't decomposed a lot. But the urea is done and gone.

Compost DOES add nutrients, but it's really nutrients for the bacterial herd that slowly create plant fertilizer out of soil. It doesn't really add nutrients for plants. So compost is sort of a slow, long-term, indirect plant fertilizer. Not a fast, short term , direct one.

But isn't that the good way of getting 'fertiliser'? (if you are a plant.) Slow and steady instead of big hits periodically.

The paper didn't really mix in with manure as well as I thought it would. But I have much more fluff in this soil than I thought. I've thrown in leaves, pine straw, and pine shavings into the chicken run every so often over the course of the last year. It has produced some pretty nice looking stuff. I just mixed the big bag of paper into the whole thing, more or less and will cover it with leaves and pine straw. Lord willing, this will make a good place for peppers come spring.

Most people give plants fertilizer by buying it and applying it. Big hits periodically. They think they need it. I agree that they probably don't. I'm just saying that there ain't much fertilizer in compost, though compost ends up helping it be produced. If your soil is seriously lacking in nutrients, digging in compost before you plant won't help much.

As to mixing paper with manure, just apply water and stir/cultivate/dig. Then a few weeks later, do it again. And again. The paper will eventually disappear. I stir shredded paper into my compost regularly, and it starts out looking like a bunch of dirty shredded paper.

"If you have the room, consider this scheme - alternating garden areas and chicken runs."

Yes, that is exactly what I am doing. I have two raised beds sitting side by side. I built the chicken run over one of them, left the chickens there for about six months and then moved it to the other one. I left it there for over a year, actually I think it was closer to two years, and now I've moved it back over the first one.

I posted some pictures last year and the good results I got from that first bed location. I'll post the link.

http://forums2.gardenweb.com/discussions/3276555/chickens-a-soils-good-friend

I remember that okra patch ... it loves clay.

If you toss all your kitchen scraps to the chickens they will compost them for you.

That's a great idea, to do that alternation of garden areas and chicken runs. Especially if you throw some carbon (say, shredded paper, kitchen scraps, etc.) in on the chicken runs. Because FRESH manure is a more powerful compost-driver than old manure. So you can basically be doing some composting while the chickens are running around on it. It isn't well appreciated how fresh manure has vastly more nitrogen than old manure. That's because of urea hydrolysis. I suppose if you can dry out the chicken manure quickly, the urea will be preserved, but as long as it is wet, it'll be degrading. That's another advantage with chicken manure, I suppose, in that it will dry out a lot faster than, say, cattle manure.

My coop and run is rather stationary ( it could be moved but would require a fork lift and a lot of manual labor) but I do get similar results with letting the chickens manufacture the compost for me.

My 8x22 run is enclosed with 1/4" hardware cloth. Throughout the year I toss in various things including bagged leaves and pine shavings for litter, kitchen scrapes, garden debris, Halloween pumpkins, etc. The chickens do their thing and eventually the 'finished' product is forced out of the perimeter of the run thru the hardware cloth already sifted. I just go around the outside periodically with a rake, spade, and wheel barrow and collect it and then apply to the gardens as a mulch. Good stuff!

In the coop I have a 'poop board' under the roosts that catches all of their droppings while they are on the roost at night. The poop board has a ~1" layer of Sweet PDZ (a granular horse stall freshener) that keeps the odor to a minimum and makes cleaning up the manure as easy as cleaning a cat's litter box. This gets periodically added to the newest compost pile.

Unfortunately I am down to only 3 old biddy hens at the moment from the original 10. My rooster died just yesterday from old age I guess (6 y/o). He had been progressively getting worse for a couple weeks now so it is good that he is now out of his misery. I buried him in next year's tomato bed! Planning to get at least 6 more pullets in the spring. Maybe rehome another rooster as well but it will be tough to find a better one than Cogburn.