• You are making it more trouble than it has to be and starter is a waste of money(the manure already contains what it needs). If chips were on floor since last cleaning,I would expect what came off floor to be composted and ready to go. Since fresh grass was mixed in,that's lilkly what's turning white and will soon be digested. There's now reason to withhold kitchen scraps,put-um in there now. With the % chicken manure to carbon,the material will be high in N.

Your coop is perfect to keep the girls healthy,keep it dry and do as you are doing after it's removed. Yes,that stuff off of board is hot but great stuff soon as it hits daylight,just don't over apply. Alow me to explain. A chicken's digestive system is several times as efficient as sheep,cattle and horses. In reality,a chicken can survive,lay eggs,be happy and live to old age eating nothing other than cow poop. Why? Because the cow only extract's a small % of nutrients from what she eats. That leave's most of nutrients for the chicken. That's why cow poop need's to be composted and chicken doesn't. Stated another way,food is basicly composted during digestion. I done got us in deep doo doo,lets get out of it. (:

I try to keep it simple and layer my hen poop (1 - 5 gallon bucket at a time) between layers of leaves, grass clippings, and kitchen waste in every compost pile I build. The final top layer is more poop. If materials are dry and no rain is expected I'll lightly water down the driest ingredients, usually leafs, while building. I don't turn the pile until it's needed about 8 months later. Piles built now are ready by next spring.

You can, however, turn your pile more often and it will finish faster. And Nick, since yours is getting dry in the center, by all means turn and water it maybe once a week while it's hot. Which won't be too many weeks.

I would not wait to add kitchen scraps and other stuff. Once compost is ready to use, you're just losing mass and nutrients by adding more stuff to it, so the best thing is to add stuff to the pile for a while, then stop, let the pile finish and start a new one, no matter how small it is to begin with. Compost needs to cure for a bit after the hot phase, and many piles never get hot due to the slow gradual addition of materials over several months. That's OK too. But you'll probably want two piles.

Best not to put plastic underneath, but if the pile dries out, cover it LOOSELY to cut down evaporation from wind and sun. An enclosed bin can help a lot, but I don't recommend a trash can. No holes and very hard to empty/turn. Just get a compost bin, or a circle of chicken wire or other fencing, lined around the sides with something if you like.

I clean my henhouse out twice a year. My bedding is wood shavings and leaves, but I run the house like a compost pile, so lots of stuff goes in the house---seaweed, pumpkins, weeds, lobster shells, apples and pears in the fall, etc. I'd happily use this as a mulch when I muck it out, but I generally add it as a layer when .I flip and rebuild my pile.

Hey veggie king, hi!

Nick, it sounds like a great plan and I wish you luck. If you really go to town (or...the ranch?) you may end up with THREE bins. I used to have a triple pallet bin that produced a LOT of compost to improve my poor soil. I've cut way back on importing since the nutrient levels have skyrocketed, so I don't go looking for compostables much anymore.

Happy rotting!

"Then I could do some extreme composting and turn it some with a tractor bucket."

Now you're talking. Cow manure plus the occasional chicken along with carbons that come along is all that's required to turn out good compost. Depending on your climate,you need to wet it occasionally to keep it damp.

Now let's see if we can make it easier for you to come visit with us. With houzz open,click explore all topics in the left margin. Scroll topics and click those that interest you. That will put that topic at the top of left margin under my topics. Ever time you open houzz,the list will appear in left margin and all posts to those topics will appear in random order at center of page. Click Soil,Compost and Mulch to come straight here. BTW,your complaint is shared by everyone else. I don't know why they keep monkeying with it to make it worse. Hope that make's it easier for you.

What do you want to do with your several acres, i.e. what do you want to plant there? What are you improving the soil for? Timeframe? What's the problem with the soil now?

You'll probably see from exploring the forum that the same similar recommendations come up again and again: organic materials. Lots of it. Time. Optional / alternatives: tilling the organic matter in, cover crops.

Since quantity matters with organic materials, what's available locally and cheap/reasonably priced is a factor. Manure and wood chips are usually high on availability at low price. Mix, compost, spread in whatever state you and neighours can tolerate and that fits your land/garden's use. It can make sense to amend sections separately and to experiment.

If amending large areas and there's plenty of time to do it, there's no need to compost stuff before putting it down. You could section off an area and spread layers of compostables on it and let it compost in place. If you could get free wood chips from the utility tree crew, or loads of leaves, you can put down manure/bedding and cover with mulch. The worms and the rest of the soil food web will digest and incorporate it for you. It takes time but it's less handling, and even more importantly, the decomposition process itself is a very fertile process. Doing it right where you want to build soil is the most effective way. Most people in most situations just don't want to devote the time and space to it, and they like the 'neat' appeal of compost piles and bins. But there's nothing magic about composting first. Nature doesn't do it that way.

Thank you, tox. I wanted to say that the simple way would just be to do exactly what you suggested - skip the compost stage, manure, then wood chips and leaves. Lots of it. And then wait. Don't know why iI didn't just write that.

Sometimes it takes a village! :-D

Let us know how it works out.

I happened to deal with a couple large piles of partially-composted leaves over the weekend; they could have sat longer but I had some free time to work outdoors. Wheelbarrowed the stuff over to thickly cover some bare ground in unused areas; the result was an unsightly mess, uneven, with small sticks and some very clumpy chunks of leaves here and there that had matted and decomposed less. But smelled like soil - mostly.

So I ran the lawnmower over the whole section of rotting leaves and viola! It's almost completely even, looks like a well-ground mulch/compost and not leaves, the sticks mostly unnoticeable (ground up), and it looks like a dream - at least for those who dream of a nice, earthy, compost mulch.

Not much work, no screening or raking required.