How to Use Chickens to Make Great Compost
Put your chickens to work for you making beautiful compost from this year’s garden leftovers…
The summer garden season is over, which means it’s time to clean up the garden areas and get your homestead situated for winter. Enter: The humble chicken!
If you raise chickens, they can be a great help in this area. You can either let your chickens into the garden area to scratch around and eat any leftover vegetable scraps and insects and help break down any remaining garden plants, or you can throw your garden waste into the chicken pen and let them have at it, as the article below describes.
The simple method described here is a great way to create beautiful compost for next year’s garden with minimal work (by letting the chickens do the work for you). It’s super easy, and your chickens will love it, too!
Here’s how to use chickens to make great compost:
Step 1: Throw Compostable Items to the Birds!
Yard “waste”, weeds, kitchen scraps, picnic remains… if it’s organic and will break down in a reasonable amount of time, throw it to your hens.
When you prune trees you can take the entire pruned branches and toss them into the chicken run. When all the leaves fall off, pull the branches out again and throw them into a hugelkultur mound, turn them into biochar, or use them for rocket stove fuel.
The leaves will be turned into compost by your birds, and then you can use that compost in your garden.
Step 2: Make a Compost Sifter and Start Sifting
I used to have a proper compost sifter made from pressure treated wood with hardware cloth nailed on it. Now I just use a bent piece of hardware cloth. Redneck, but it works.
Throw the dirt and compost from the floor of your coop or chicken run onto the hardware cloth and sift it through. This keeps the rocks and big pieces of junk out of your garden, though if you were going to use this chicken run compost for fruit trees you could just shovel it into a wheelbarrow and skip the sifting.
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You will see various twigs and debris left behind by the birds. Eventually everything woody will break down, so I don’t take the little twigs out of the run – I just leave them to be turned and manured by the chickens until they’re compost.
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