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!

An Experiment in Making Liquid Fertilizer

We haven't done the chemical fertilizer thing in quite some time.  Generally, we use a multifaceted approach to soil fertility.  We amend lots of compost into the soil, leaves, biochar, organic matter.  Then we use fish emulsion for foliar feeding as well as around the base of the plant.  Prior to planting, we incorporate composted wood chips with composted cow poop and chicken poop into the soil.

I've been looking at other ideas and wanted to do an experiment on a small scale prior to going full-throttle with it.  It has to do with making liquid fertilizer concentrate with things you have not far from the garden.  Weeds!  In my hand below is an assortment of winter grasses.  I got a sling blade and chopped a 5 gallon bucket full of weeds.  Weeds have everything you need to get started.

The next thing you need is leaf mold.  Leaf mold can be found in the moist forest floor.  I didn't even need to go to the woods.  I dug into the wood chip pile that is decomposing and found plenty of it.  Leaf mold contains mycelium.  Mycelium are the white thread-like fungi that are working behind the scenes to turn wood and leaves into topsoil.  In addition to your 5 gallon bucket of weeds, add a handful of leaf mold.

Put both the weeds and leaf mold into a bucket.

Fill the bucket with rain water.

Snap the lid on the bucket securely and set the bucket in your garden in full sun.

Leave for several weeks and let it "cook."  Then use the liquid to fertilize your plants.  I'm told that you must dilute it, starting off weak so as not to burn your plants.  We'll update you in a few weeks when we pop the top off.  I'm told this stuff stinks to high heaven, so we were warned not to get it on your clothes.  Maybe this will be done by the time we need to fertilize the cucumbers you see behind the bucket.

Potato Trouble!

Have you ever done something that you really regret?  Something that you messed up on and you can't fix it?  There's a saying that goes, "You can't un-ring a bell."  Well, the bell has rung and it's a sad note.  The 2023 potato crop is probably going to be a total crop failure.  Was it due to the weather?  Nope.  Was it because of pest problems?  Nope.

It was because of me.  I planted 122 seed potatoes in the ground in the garden in the side yard.  I dug a hole, put a handful of composed chicken litter in the bottom of the hole,  filled the hole with rich compost and then planted the seed potato and covered it with composted wood chips - a nice medium for potatoes to thrive in.

And thrive, they did.  We achieved a 100% germination rate.  The potato plants grew with vigor for about three weeks.  And then...

They took on this sickly, yellowish hue.  All growth stopped.  Some of the potatoes withered and died.  I hate to even look at what's left of them.  When I walk out that way to check on the bees, I avert my eyes.

Here is a potato plant on the end of the row.  It's unscathed.  It looks lush and green like they are supposed to look.

A Post-mortem:  So what happened?  Here are the unsavory details the best I can figure it.  I got the composted chicken litter from the hen house beneath the roost.  It's good fertilizer, but it's "hot."  You must let it cool down some before using.  That's why I remove the top layer and get the chicken litter that's the oldest.  I put it it a big tub for further composting.  

For whatever reason, I must have picked up some chicken litter that was too hot.  I placed it in the bottom of the hole and then put soil on top and then planted the potato in the soil.  All was good for a while... Until the roots from the potato hit the chicken litter.  What should have caused them to jump up with vigor and turn and blue-green, healthy color, instead was too strong.  Much too strong.  It burned the plant, essentially cooking it.

I'll still dig them up and see what we have.  I was looking so forward to eating fresh Irish potatoes with snap beans.  It's one of my favorite garden duos.  I thought we were going to be harvesting a bumper crop of potatoes and I'd be able to use our new drying wagon to cure them.  I realized the truth to the adage, "Don't count your chickens before they hatch."  The Bible says it even better:

Proverbs 27:1 Do not boast about tomorrow, For you do not know what a day may bring.

Oh well, there's always next year's crop!

Something Smells Fishy!

Do you ever have things on your To Do List that linger?  I sure do.  I have had "Put Fish Emulsion on Garden Plants" on my list for the longest time.  Short days and busy weekends resulted in fertilizing my winter garden naturally on the back burner.  Until Christmas Eve!  I got off half a day and hurried home as fast as my car would take me.  It was a gorgeous afternoon and I had a few open hours to get this item scratched off my list at last!

I picked up this natural fertilizer up years ago at a hardware store.  It was priced at $7.99 per box.  It's what everyone needs - a big box of powdered fish.  I don't know how they make this stuff, but it must not be a pleasant job.  It is a grayish powder that has a very fishy smell to it.  As bad as it smells, your plants will love it.  It will make them grow lush and green.  Remember the old Thanksgiving story about the Indians planting corn and digging a hole right next to the seed and burying a fish?  That fish fed the corn.  Fish is full of protein and nitrogen.  Fish also absorb the minerals in the sea.  Those minerals will now feed your garden.  Plants really dig that!

The directions on the box says to mix 1 tablespoon of fish emulsion powder to 1 gallon of water.  I put the fish emulsion into my garden sprayer and then fill it with water up to the 1 gallon line.  I give it a good shaking and then give the sprayer 15 pumps and I'm ready to go.

I sprayed everything growing in the garden with the fish emulsion concoction.  I sprayed at the base of the plant, so that it saturated the ground where the roots can take in the nutrients.  I also sprayed the leaves of all the plants, giving them a foliar feeding.  Some of my plants were a little yellow.  I could tell they were missing something.  I'll bet that this weekend or a few days after that, the plants will have a nice, healthy color to them.

Feeding Our Sugar Snap Peas

I kept making batch after batch of this stuff until I had really given the garden a good dose of the smelly fertilizer.  Then the sun was casting long shadows and it was time to go milk the cows.

But my work wasn't done.  If you use fish emulsion, let me give you a word of advice: Clean your garden sprayer!  One time I didn't do this.  I left about a half gallon of fish emulsion in the garden sprayer and forgot about it for a week on the back patio.  Over the week, it had "cooked" in the sprayer as the sun baked and fermented the contents.  When I removed the top, it had a smell that... well, I can't describe.  It smelled like the worst sewerage I had ever smelled.  Furthermore, it clogged up the screen on the bottom of the sprayer and rendered the sprayer clogged and useless.  Learning from my mistake, I ran two gallons of water through the sprayer to wash it out and stored it back in the box.  I intend on dosing the plants up again with the funky fish as soon as they appear to need it!  I even watched a few YouTube videos on how to make homemade fish emulsion with fish guts, molasses and water.  You pour all that in a trash can with water and put the lid on it and let it ferment for several months. (Not a good idea if your neighbors live close to you!)

Feeding the Corn

We harvested one row of corn.  I wasn't that impressed.  The variety was Fisher's Earliest Corn and it was the first time I'd grown that variety.  While it was the earliest, it just wasn't the best.  It wasn't that sweet, it only had one ear per stalk, and only grew to maybe four feet tall.  Even though we amend our soil with lots of compost and add composted chicken manure and cow manure, I suspect we are still lacking in fertility.  Corn requires lots of nitrogen.

For the second row of a different variety called Stowell's Evergreen Sweet Corn, I want to give the corn some 'food' to help boost productivity.  Here's the thing that may amaze you.  Even with three cows and three bulls grazing all over the pasture, producing lots of poop, we don't get to use a lot of cow poop in the garden.  The reason is that the chickens quickly spread the cow manure over the grass while they search for tasty morsels in the poop.  The fertility isn't lost.  The pasture soil gets it instead of the garden soil.

This year I'm trying Gurney's Sweet Corn Food.  The ingredients are bone meal, corn gluten, kelp meal, dried molasses, poultry manure, soybean meal, and sunflower ash.

It has good reviews.  It smells kind of funky and looks a little like chicken scratch, but I'm gonna give it a try.

The package says to wait until the corn is 5 or 6 inches tall and then dig a shallow trench and apply the sweet corn food as a side dressing.

The suggested rate of application is 2 cups per 25 feet of row.  I sprinkled the prescribed amount in the trench and then will cover and gently water in.

I'll report back with results.  What I'm looking for is a 'greening' up of the leaves and a 'jump' in the growth rate which will hopefully result in higher productivity/yield.  If this doesn't work, there are many other products to try.  I'd like to stick with organic fertilizers.  Today I was reading about using earthworm castings.  I also use fish emulsion from time to time.  Next year, I may do a test plot to compare different organic fertilizers on the same row of corn to determine which one gives me the biggest bang for the buck.  For this year, I'm hopeful that the Sweet Corn Food will do the trick!

The Blessing of Side Dressing

I remember when my grandfather taught me how to garden.  It opened a whole new world to me.  Simply watching the miracle of a seed being dropped in a hole and a few days later witnessing the tender seedling sprout out of the ground had me hooked for life.  I remember how he taught me to water and weed the garden and, as the plants began to grow, to side dress my vegetables with fertilizer.  "Just like you and I eat, plants have to eat, too," he told me.

These days I primarily feed the soil, amending it almost daily with compost and other organic fertilizers, pulling out weeds, mulching it.  It is always important to take care of your soil, if you want it to take care of you.  Our cole crops are growing quite nicely.  Even though we got a bad start, losing most of our cole crop seedlings to rainy, soggy weather that persisted for months on end, we went to plan B and recovered nicely.  On a nice Saturday afternoon, the temperatures in December spiked to 80 degrees, causing the leaves on the cabbage, broccoli and cauliflower to wilt a little.  They like cooler temps. 

I took the opportunity on this glorious day to side dress the vegetable plants.  I wanted to give them some food to make them happy as they will begin producing heads in the next few weeks or a month.  Just as we operate best when we're well-fed, plants will produce best when they have the nutrients they need.  There is nothing quite like home-grown vegetables fresh from the garden.

I had some organic fertilizer tucked away on the shelf under my work bench and got it out and headed to the garden.  Russ came out to help me.  I grabbed an old spoon that we no longer use to eat with to use for digging holes.  I find that is the best thing to use when side dressing.  When plants are close together, I don't want to risk damaging any of them with a hoe.  A spoon is much easier to use for this task.  Side dressing is doing precisely what the name suggests - with the spoon, I dug a hole on the side of the plant and deposited the prescribed amount of fertilizer into the hole and then covered it up.

Side dressing allows the nutrients to be available near 'root-level' so that the fertilizer is accessible to the growing plant.  We'll check on them in a few days to see if the plants are happy with their "meal." 

Expensive Fertilizer for the Garden

Last week we had some phenomenal lines of thunderstorms blow through, bringing with them torrential downpours of rain.  I measured 4.8 inches in my rain gauge, but there's no telling how much we really got. My rain gauge only has a 5 inch capacity, and I'm sure some splashed out of the top.  We also got some very strong straight-line winds, with gusts as high as 60 miles per hour.

Needless to say, this was not good weather for the meat birds in our new chicken tractor.  I was concerned about the birds and kept running out the front door and walking on the porch toward the west side of the house and peering out, trying to catch a glimpse of our Cornish Cross meat birds between the blowing wind and rain that battered my face.

You see, it was hard to see because our power was out.  It went out at 8 p.m. and didn't come back on again until noon the next day.  But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me rewind the cassette a bit. There was a tornado warning in effect, we had no power, and it was raining cats and dogs.  At one point I thought I saw the tarp blow off the chicken tractor.  I told Tricia that I was going to wait until it slacked up a bit to go check on the birds.

At about 10:30 the wind slowed a little and there appeared to be a break in the rain. We both put on our slicker suits and rubber boots and walked across the backyard toward the area where the chicken tractor was positioned.  My flashlight brought the chicken tractor into view.  Something wasn't right!  The chicken tractor lay on its side.  The wind had flipped it over.  As I panned across the yard with the beam of my light, I saw what appeared to be white rags littering the landscape in a 50 square foot area.  The wind must have knocked over someone's garbage cans.  Wait a minute - those aren't rags!  Those are birds.  Our birds!  Our soaking wet, shivering, half-dead birds.  I picked up the first bird I came to.  It was dead.  I turned to Tricia and said, "We lost all of our birds."  But as we walked around, there weren't all dead.  Some were alive.  Thank you, Lord.

I flipped the chicken tractor over.  It was in good shape.  Tricia helped me to walk around and pick up every single bird.  Some were dead - three for sure.  I stacked their cold carcasses outside the tractor.   The rest were suffering from the effects of hypothermia. Since our power was out, I couldn't turn the heat lamp on and warm them up.  I did the next best thing.  I stacked them very close together inside the chicken tractor where their body heat could warm each other up.

The next morning at 5 a.m. I wasn't sure what would be awaiting us.  Would ANY of the chickens be alive?  I opened the door and heard some chirping.  There were birds looking back at me - definitely alive.  In all 13 meat birds succumbed to the effects of the stormy weather.  When I got back from work in the evening, I carried several buckets of dead chickens to the place of interment.

When you hear the term "Bucket of Chicken," you normally think KFC - not this gruesome sight!!

With a few minutes of manual labor behind the familiar handle of a shovel, I dug a trench between the garden rows from last year's garden and deposited the fallen fowl into the shallow grave. I fashioned a crude cross for the 13 meat birds' final resting place, and God providentially sent rays of sunlight to illuminate the chicken cemetery.

Now I must remember, it could have been worse.  Much, much worse.  Maybe 8 or 10 years ago, I lost every single bird after a rain storm.  25 meat birds that were healthy and about the size of Cornish hens were dead.  We only lost 13 of the birds this time.

I also learned a lesson.  Although the center of gravity is low on the new chicken tractor, if we are expecting strong winds, I need to be diligent about staking the chicken tractor down and getting out to check on the birds EVEN BEFORE the storm subsides.  If I would have gotten out there a little earlier, I might have saved them all.

There is a silver lining to this sad story.   Like the Indian's fish provided nutrients to the pilgrim's growing corn, the chickens' dead carcasses will do the same later this year, feeding our vegetables and providing a bumper crop of delicious vegetables.  It's just doggone expensive fertilizer!

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.

Feathered Fertilizer Spreaders

On October 15th of last year we showed you in this blog post: replacement hens, how we received baby chicks in the mail that day and put them in the brooder in the garage.  The babies were ordered to take the place of aged hens that just naturally die over the course of time.  Consequently, each passing year we add new birds to the flock to take the place of those whose egg-laying days have past.  Those hens that have assumed room temperature are buried in the garden and now produce vegetables for us - dead or alive, a laying hen's work is never done!

The new chicks, which included mostly Barred Rock hens, also included a few Barred Rock cockerels, a few Aracaunas, and four guinea fowl, grew quickly and they were moved to the chicken tractor in the pasture.  Today they are 117 days old, give or take a few days, and that puts them right at 17 weeks old.  Barred Rocks will begin to lay between 20-24 weeks old, so we are still about a month and a half away from seeing the first pullet eggs.

The photo below shows the birds in the tractor eating the chick grower crumbles that I've dropped them. The brownish-grey birds are Aracaunas, most of the black and white speckled ones are barred rock pullets, with a barred rock cockerel just to the right of center.  He's a bit bigger than the others. The all white and all grey birds are guineas of the White African, Pearl Grey, and Lavender varieties.

Birds are 'a growin'!

Each day I feed and water them and push the tractor forward.  The birds are better than a lawn mower.  In just a day, they clip the grass down.  They really enjoy eating grass.  If you butcher one, their crop will be full of tender grass.  There's another thing they do, though.  They poop.  They poop a lot.  Like a fertilizer spreader, they distribute chicken manure all across the pasture as I push the tractor to a new spot each day.

When the pullets begin to lay their first eggs, I'll clip their wings and release them to roam free on the 3 acre pasture.  Free at last!  The older birds you see below behind the tractor that I've just pushed are opportunistic.  When I push the tractor, like scavengers, they look for any tidbits that they can find to eat.  I see them eating the small feathers that the pullets have shed.  Feathers have protein, so that's what they are after, but I can't imagine feathers being very appetizing. 

The clean-up crew

I wanted to show you another photograph.  At first glance you will see a pasture that is mostly brown due to the frost, with a tinge of green grass stubbornly trying to hang on until spring.  You'll also probably notice my shadow as the morning sun casts shadows westward.  If you look in the very center of the photo, you will see a brown line.  That is the trail that is left behind as I push the chicken tractor.  It is marked by grass clipped down and rich chicken manure.  It looks like a dead landscape, but once a rain hits it, the nitrogen-laden chicken poop will cause the grass to grow very green in that trail.  It changes from a brown trail, to a dark green one.  The cows appreciate their feathered fertilizer spreaders!

The Trail

But in about a month and a half, the trail you see above will end as they will all be released to free range.  Have no fear, though.  We just placed our 2016 Meat Bird order.  At the end of this month we'll be receiving sixty (60) one day old meat birds in the mail.  We do this annually to raise our own chickens to eat over the year. They'll spend about 3 weeks in the brooder in the garage and then... Then they will occupy the same chicken tractor that the replacement hens will be evicted from and they will pick up the fertilizer spreader duties from the pullets.  And the cycle continues...

"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!

Liquid Fish

Fertilizer.  We don't use normal fertilizer to encourage growth in the vegetables in our garden.  We mainly work to build healthy soil by amending it with organic matter and compost.  This attracts worms which in turn add fertility to the soil.  To that soil, we'll also work in composted chicken and cow manure into the soil between crop plantings.

In addition to those all natural fertilizers, we use another one - fish emulsion.  We use it in several forms - one is a powdered form, shown below, that you mix a couple tablespoons of the fish powder with a gallon of water and then pour the stinky liquid in a garden sprayer, shake it, pump it and spray it.

Powder form of fish-based fertilizer

Today, however, we're going to use not a powdered form of fish, but a liquid one. It's called Shafer Liquid Fish.  Liquid fish.  Think about that.  This bottle of brown sludge is exactly that.  It is fish caught out of the Mississippi River that is ground down and pureed into a 'soup.'  This soup is chock-full of nutrients and minerals that plants need to grow.  Remember how the Native Americans taught the early settlers to bury a fish by the newly planted corn?  This is the same concept.  As the fish decomposed, it released fertilizer that the corn utilized to grow.  Well, here is a bottle of liquid fish. Let's get busy!

Liquid Fish

As I popped the top and unscrewed the bottle a smell filled the garage.  A foul smell. It reminded me of the smell of the pogy plant south of Lake Charles around Cameron.  When I was a kid, we would go crabbing down there and I remember that awful smell.  Pogies are a small fish that were caught and then brought to the pogie plant where they would be ground and cooked.  It was a smell like no other and a smell I still recall years later.  This smell now filled by garage.

A liquid fish cocktail

The ratio of liquid fish to water is 1:20, so i poured the bottle of liquid fish into my garden sprayer and then poured 20 bottles full of rainwater in the garden sprayer that I fished (pardon the pun) out of the rainwater that I caught off of our roof after the previous days' rain.

Filling with rainwater

I shook the sprayer to mix the water and fish sludge and then pumped up the sprayer to pressurize it and then walked out to the garden and began to spray it on the plants.  As you can see below I began spraying all of the leaves of the plants. The picture below shows me spraying the row of broccoli with liquid fish.  This spray provides a good foliar feeding to the plant.  Foliar feeding is where leaves are given a generous spraying of fish emulsion so that their leaves are able to absorb nutrients in the liquid fish through their leaves.

Foliar Feeding of Foul Smelling Fish

As a cold front was coming in, some of the fish mist splashed up into my face, providing a reminder to always stand upwind when spraying!  When I was finished a strong smell lingered in the air around the garden. Despite the smell, this will give our plants a boost.  One thing of note, since we are currently harvesting kale and bok choy, I did not spray those rows as I wanted to ensure that our greens weren't fish flavored when we eat them.

Spreading Fertilizer to Grow Healthy, Green Grass for the Cows

Today, I wanted to talk about broadcasting fertilizer, or more specifically, spreading manure.

Whoa.  No, not that kind.  Animal manure.  This is not a political blog.  We like to talk about agriculture and family values.

I've captured below, for your viewing pleasure, a freshly laid, cow patty that is about as perfect as you can imagine that has just plopped from about a four foot height straight from Daisy's bottom.  This nice steaming pile consists of digested grass and water, a by product or waste from the cow's digestive system.  I want to show the cycle that occurs and also highlight the symbiotic relationship that is working out here on Our Maker's Acres Family Farm.

If you focus your eye on the center of the pie and work your eye upwards to the one o'clock position, you will see not one, but two flies.  This is important and I'll explain more about that in a minute after you gaze into this masterpiece for a while.

Cow Patty

Flies are attracted to poop, there's no denying that, but so are chickens, and that is a good thing for the grass in the pasture, the chickens and ultimately the cows.  Here's how the cycle works:  The cow eats the grass and poops.  The flies will lay their eggs in the cow patty and hatch out large, juicy maggots.  It just so happens that those are appetizing to chickens.  The chickens will use their legs to scatter out the poop, hunting for tasty morsels to dine on in the cow poop.  You can see that one of the hens and Daisy are eating together, side by side.

Working together - Teamwork

Actually we have a number of chickens that work in the sanitation crew, spreading the cow manure all throughout the pasture.  In a feedlot, you won't see grass growing.  The poop is piled so thick that it stinks and the nitrogen content is too "hot" to allow any grass to grow.  I don't have the time or stamina to spread all the poop, but the chickens have a vested interest in doing so.

Scattered cow poop, coupled with the sunshine and rain, provides a great growing environment for healthy pasture grass.  The cows will eat that grass and convert the energy into delicious milk for our family to enjoy. The hens convert the foraging from the poop, bugs & worms in the pasture to fresh eggs for us and our customers to consume.  Finally the scattered poop grows more grass, keeping the wonderful cycle going 365 days a year!

Remember that pretty cow patty we viewed above?  Well this is all that remains of it once the chickens have scattered it out.  Rains will further erode this into the soil.

Spreading it all out

It doesn't take long at all for the cow patty to be completely gone and out of sight... They've broadcast the manure into a wide circle that dilutes the effect of the round brown mound that's fallen down.

But the effects of the cow patty remain.  Look in the photo below and you'll see that the old adage, "the grass always grows greener over the septic tank" applies to the cow patty as well.  Look how lush and dark green the grass is over the spot where a cow patty once rested.

The Grass Always Grows Greener over the Cow Patty

You'd think that the cows would go and gobble that lush grass up, but just like you and me - they don't like to eat food from the bathroom.  The Good Lord has given them instincts to not eat near the bacteria and parasites that accompanies poop.  You'll notice that they eat around the dark green growth, but never directly over it. Next year the ground will still retain some of the fertilization from the poop that has bettered the soil.  By that time, things will have "cooled down" where the cows will be able to eat the green grass that will grow there.

The Circle of Life!

The Grass Grows Greener...

"The Grass Always Grows Greener over the Septic Tank."  That was the name of a book by Erma Bombeck, a humorous columnist that my Mom used to read.  The title of the book is funny - and true.  There is a reason that the grass is greener in that location.  I don't want to get into the details as you might be eating breakfast as you read this, but I think you know what I'm talking about.

Let's take a virtual walk out to the pasture and we can discuss it while you finish your coffee.  As I lift the lid on one of the chicken tractors, you can see the Barred Rock pullets eating some Chick Grower and foraging around in the grass.  A pullet is a young hen.  They are really growing.  They are so lively.  I have to be careful when I open the lid because they'll fly out.  They roost up on the roosting bars. 

After I finish milking Daisy in the morning, I feed them and since they roost on one bar, there is a big line of poop on the grass under the bar.  So I roll the chicken tractor one length forward.  If I didn't do this, the chicken poop would build up and burn the grass in the tractor.  Pretty soon there would be nothing but dirt underneath them.  That would defeat the purpose.  I want the chicken poop to be spread around the entire pasture, fertilizing the grass so that it grows green, lush, and tall for the cows to eat.


Barred Rock Pullets

As we walk over to the Cornish Cross Meat birds, they are growing as well.  At last count I think there are around 80 birds in this chicken tractor.  They eat a lot and poop a lot, so I push their tractor once or twice a day.  They are getting a little cramped up and need some elbow room.  It is time to extend the square footage of the tractor.  The way I do this is by adding a couple of hog panels to the end of the tractor.  I secure the panels to the tractor with wire.  It is sturdy and is pretty easy to pull as someone pushes the tractor.

High Population Density

This photo shows that by adding the panels, I've more than doubled the square footage of their humble home.  When I opened the door, they all hopped out to explore the new area.


Wide open spaces

They also jumped out to eat.  Rather than buying expensive chicken feeding troughs from the feed store or building some out of wood,  I purchased a couple of 10 foot length PVC gutters from the hardware store, dump the feed in the them, and like Bachman Turner Overdrive sings, they start Takin' Care of Business.  The gutters used as feed troughs work great.  They are inexpensive, lightweight, and durable.  The birds line up on either side of it (or some jump in it) and eat to their heart's content.

Hungry Birds

Back to the title of today's posting.  As I move them each day, their poop is broadcast across the pasture.  The grass reacts to the nitrogen and grows bright green.  The picture below illustrates this.  If you look closely, you can see that the grass right behind the tractor is greener than the other grass.


Can you see the dark green trail where the chicken tractor has been?

The grass grows greener, faster, and taller in the trail behind the tractor.

Trail behind another chicken tractor

You've got to be careful, though.  Chicken poop is "hot" and can burn your grass if you don't move the tractors often enough.  As a result of the burning you can see below, I started pushing the tractors twice a day instead of only once.  

Careful.  Chicken poop will burn your grass

Not to worry, though.  After a rain and a week or two, this area will be dark green again, providing lush grass for Daisy, Rosie, Stryker, Maggie and Bully.