Homegrown Fertilizer

In a post back on April 5th entitled a "foul smelling concoction", we described how we're turning weeds and garden waste into liquid fertilizer by inoculating with cow manure, rainwater and letting it ferment in 5 gallon buckets in the sun.  Homegrown fertilizer.  It has proven itself.  We've never had bigger, healthier, more productive yellow squash and zucchini!

We have another way that we produce homegrown fertilizer.  It's derived in our henhouse.  You might call it a "fowl" smelling concoction as well.  It is in the hen house where the chickens roost at night on roosting bars on the eastern wall.  You can see the sun filtering in from the western sky as I stand in the doorway.  Over time, the poop piles up underneath the place where they roost.

If you allow it to pile up, the henhouse has a strong ammonia smell.  It reminds me of how they describe bat guano in caves.  Every so often, in order to gather fertilizer AND to freshen up the aroma in there, I shovel the chicken litter into a wagon and pull to the garden.

On this particular afternoon I was able to fill two 30 gallon molasses tubs with composted litter.  I'll cover with a lid to keep it sealed off and dry.  If you look closely at it, in addition to chicken poop, there is straw and feathers mixed in as well.

Chicken litter is high in nitrogen and must be composted or cooled down for about four months until it is "cooled off" enough for use around plants to ensure that you don't burn the plants.  The tricky part of this is that most of the chicken manure in the tub is composted.  However, some of it on the top layer under the roost is fresh.  What I've always been able to do is to mix the litter thoroughly in order to incorporate the fresher manure with the composted manure and then either top dress or incorporate in the soil before planting.  It's an inexact science and it could (pardon the pun) burn me, but up to this point, it hasn't bothered the plants in the garden.

Free fertilizer made right here on our little farm.  It beats the pants off of buying it!

Black Gold

In my childhood each afternoon after school we'd gather around the television set and watch shows like Gilligan's Island, I Dream of Jeannie, The Little Rascals, and The Beverly Hillbillies.  In the Beverly Hillbillies, Jed's life changed along with Ely Mae, Jethro, and Granny's when Jed shot and discovered Black Gold or Texas Tea. You know the rest of the story.  They loaded up their truck and they moved to Beverly... Hills, that is... Swimming pools, movie stars.

Striking oil on the property sure would make farming profitable, but as of yet we haven't struck the black gold that Jed Clampett did.  However, we have discovered another type of black gold in the chicken coop.  Chicken Poop!  Many of our hens roost in chicken tractors out in the pasture and fertilize the grass.  The others roost in the hen house and their poop litters the floor beneath the roosts.  It piles up and composts.

The lure of chicken manure

Each spring and fall when putting in the new garden, I harvest the black gold from beneath the roosts, shoveling it into our garden wagon.  It is full of nitrogen rich chicken manure along with feathers.  I pull this into the garden and work it into the soil on each row prior to planting and work it in real good.

A load from the chicken commode

Chicken manure, if not composted, can be real "hot" and can burn your plants, so you have to be careful when using it.  I make sure that I never put fresh poop around the plants in the garden, but I've found that if it has composted for months, it doesn't burn the plants.  To the contrary, they 'green up' and look really healthy after application.  I will even take a handful of the black gold and put it around the base of the bigger plants to allow the slow release down to the root level following rains or waterings.

Side-dressing the broccoli

After applying the chicken manure in the garden soil prior to planting or side dressing the older plants, I turn on the sprinklers and allow the water to wash over the plants and distribute the chicken fertilizer into the soil and roots.

Watering it in

I haven't bothered sending the chicken manure off for an analysis, but it seems to be just right. Fertility produced right on site is an added bonus and continues the cycle of animals living off the land, eating grass and bugs, returning fertility to the soil to replace what they've consumed and the fertility that the plants have taken from the soil in growth.  It is a nice cycle of giving and taking.  The "Black Gold" we have on our farm will likely never make us rich, and there aren't any swimming pools or movie stars around, but our black gold is helping to make our soil rich.

A Composting Experiment

A good friend of mine loaned me a contraption called an Urban Compost Tumbler. It is essentially a barrel that rotates on a base.  You can easily turn it around and around in order to stir the contents. We're going to experiment on this third method of composting and see how it goes in comparison to two other methods we use.

We employ a couple of different types of composting methods, namely, a compost pile where we throw everything into a pile and let it rot.  This has a few negative aspects.  First, in order to compost, you must turn the pile in order to aerate the compost.  This helps the bacteria decompose the contents of the pile quicker.  This is also time consuming depending on the size of the pile.  Secondly, throwing waste in a compost pile, especially food waste, attracts varmints like rats.  Although we do compost using this method, the pile now only contains leaves and cow poop, so as not to attract vermin.

I've primarily switched to a composting method called Trench Composting.  It is easy to do.  All you have to do is dig a hole.  You can read about it more here in a post we did a while back: Trench Composting  Trench composting incorporates food waste, paper, coffee grounds, etc. directly into the soil.  The bacteria in the soil and earthworms immediately go to work breaking it down.

So here is the Urban Compost Tumbler.  Since this is a loaner model, the cost for me is FREE!  If you were to purchase this bad boy, the price tag is $379 on Amazon.  Holy Moley!  You have to produce an awful lot of compost in order for this thing to pay for itself.

The Urban Compost Tumbler

So... we'll get started with the experiment.  THIS ARTICLE explains how to compost using the Urban Compost Tumbler.  One of the important things to consider is your ratio of Carbon to Nitrogen.  Some places call in the brown to green ratio, with brown being carbon and green being nitrogen.  We are going to start with a 25:1 Carbon to Nitrogen ratio by weight.  I'm not set up to weigh it, so I'm just going to estimate.  Carbon is much lighter than the nitrogen component, so most of the contents will be hay.

As far as carbon is concerned, we have an awful lot of hay that gets wasted by the cows.  We're going to try to convert some of that waste to compost.  You can see Clarabelle in the photo below and can witness the wasted hay all around the hay ring.  They are sloppy eaters, for sure.  We'll salvage some of that and put it in the Urban Compost Tumbler.  I gathered a heaping tub of wasted hay for our carbon component.

Wasteful bovines aren't efficient eaters.

As far as nitrogen is concerned, we'll use a by product of our laying hens - chicken poop.  We have two chicken tractors that some of the hens roost on out in the pasture.  We push the tractor each day and the poop fertilizes the grass.  We harvest the poop under the roosting bars of the hen house to fertilize the garden and, in this case, to add to the compost tumbler.

Harvesting a chicken by-product

I entered the hen house with a wagon, a tub and a shovel and in no time at all, emerged with a full tub of poop mixed with feathers for our nitrogen component.

A tub of chicken poop

Now that we've gotten our carbon (hay) and our nitrogen (chicken poop), we'll get things started.  It was 70 degrees outside when I got this started.  According to what I read, you need it to be above 50 degrees to start microbe growth.  Once the pile heats up and starts "cooking" it will reach up to 130 degrees.

Recipe ingredients for compost: chicken poop and hay

I unfastened the lid to the compost tumbler.  It is well constructed and heavy and built to last.  It spins easily on its axle.

The interior of the tumbler

I added the ingredients to the tumbler, alternating hay and poop to the 25:1 ratio by weight. Obviously, most of the contents of the tumbler is hay with chicken manure distributed throughout.

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About 3/4 of the way full to leave space for mixing/tumbling

Then we'll add some moisture as that is very important in composting.  I collected some rainwater and poured that on top of the mix.  It is important to add rainwater and not tap water as tap water has been treated with chlorine to kill bacteria.  You don't want to kill bacteria in composting - you want bacteria to flourish. 

Rainwater

Then, I fastened the lid and began to spin the tumbler.  Each day, I'll give it a spin.

From what I read in THIS REVIEW we can count on finished compost in 14 weeks. We'll see if we can achieve those results.  If we make some nice compost, we'll incorporate it into the garden this spring and then will continue making batch after batch.  Stay tuned for a status report coming in a few months.

Crazy About Grass

Over the weekend we had about 5 inches of rain that fell over Our Maker's Acres Family Farm. During a momentary break in the precipitation, I hustled out there to check on the status of the rye grass that we planted on October 22nd and discussed in THIS POST.  Our previous experiments with planting rye grass by over-seeding without working up a seedbed with a plow were met with dismal results.  This year I changed up a few things and wanted to see if the new process worked. 

I got down on my hands and knees and surveyed the situation in the pasture. Whoa!  What is this I see?  I tried to contain the joy at what I saw!  Little sprouts! Rye grass was shooting up through the grass clippings that I had mowed on top of the broadcast seed.  Oh, the inhabitants of the barnyard are just gonna love this this winter when everything else is dead and brown!  Can you see the tiny green shoots?

Oh for joy!

As I was rejoicing out on my hands and knees in the pasture, I began to think how odd I must look to passersby with me out in the pasture on the ground on all fours. I bet I looked like Old Nebuchadnezzar as described below from the Book of Daniel:

Daniel 4:33 (NASB)

Immediately the word concerning Nebuchadnezzar was fulfilled; and he was driven away from mankind and began eating grass like cattle, and his body was drenched with the dew of heaven until his hair had grown like eagles’ feathers and his nails like birds’ claws.

I hope I don't look like that!  I got up from the ground and sheepishly walked out of the pasture. Although we grow many fine vegetables that we enjoy, I also get a thrill out of growing good grass that the cows, goat(s), chickens and guineas can enjoy, especially during the winter when in prior years they have had to make do primarily on hay and a little feed.

It is still a little early to pronounce success on the 2015-2016 rye grass crop.  I don't want to count my chickens before they hatch.  I'll wait a few more weeks until we really can see what type of a stand I have out there, but the initial reviews look promising - at least better than in prior years.

The grass is always greener

There were still a few minutes of daylight left, and I had a bit more energy in me, so I decided to do one more experiment.  I went and got my little Scott's Fertilizer Spreader that I planted the rye grass with and I got a bag and a half of Fertilizer made with pelletized Chicken Manure.  I quickly filled the spreader and began broadcasting the chicken manure on the rye grass.  The fertilizer I had wasn't enough to finish the entire rye grass plot, but I marked where I ran out.  I want to see if I can tell a difference where I fertilized versus where I didn't.  Since our chickens are constantly "broadcasting" chicken manure on the pasture, I want to see if broadcasting more fertilizer yielded incrementally beneficial results.  In a few weeks we'll be able to tell.

As I finished the sun faded, ushering in darkness and swarms of hungry mosquitoes ready to feast on my blood.  Time for Ol' Nebuchadnezzar to go inside for supper.  My wife has something prepared that is much better than grass for me to eat!

"Homegrown" Fertilizer

We've been working to get the Spring garden work done and get seeds and transplants in the ground. One of the things that we begin to think about is fertility of the soil.  We are always trying to better the soil and feed it liberally with compost. We also use hay/leaves to mulch around the plants to suppress weed growth. Those hay and leaves, over the course of the growing season, decompose and provide prime conditions for earthworms!

Those earthworms thrive in the rich, moist organic matter.  They aerate the soil with their tunneling and their castings (poop) provide fertilizer for our growing plants.  Speaking of fertilizer, we have a whole flock of birds that daily make it for us.  Our chicken tractors out on the pasture provide places where many of the chickens sleep at night.  Consequently, they poop, fertilizing the grass beneath them.  Each day I push the tractors one length and over the course of time, a big portion of the pasture is fertilized, producing green grass that the milk cows enjoy.

We also have a hen house where many of the hens roost on roosting bars.  In the hen house, the poop accumulates and composts.  It will pile up 6 inches deep.  It doesn't smell nice.  Below you can see the piles of chicken litter underneath the roosting bars.  On the bottom right you can see a hen with some missing feathers. She's molting right now and not looking too pretty, but she'll look great once her new feathers come in.

Homegrown Fertilizer

A couple of times a year I'll pull a wagon into the hen house with a big blue tub and shovel all of the composted chicken manure into the tubs and I'll pull it into the garden area.

Bucket 'o Poop

Now this stuff is 'hot' so I don't add a lot to the soil, because it will burn your plants, but I'll take shovelfuls and spread it over the tops of the rows in which I'll be planting and work it in real nice.   

Chicken manure worked into the soil does several things: It gives NPK (Nitrogen, Phosphorus & Potassium) that will give your plants a boost.  It gives organic matter that improves your soil quality, It also increases the water carrying capacity of your soil, which is beneficial in hot, dry areas.  In researching, I learned that a single chicken can produce 2 cubic feet of composted chicken manure in a year!  Wow, that's a lot of poop.

To me, a chicken, pound for pound is a great addition to any homestead.  They give you eggs, meat and manure.  Homegrown fertilizer made by your chickens is also beneficial in that it doesn't cost a dime!