From Coop to Garden

Sawdust

Jim from Kentucky
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This coop I built awhile back has what they call deep liter bedding system. The base is 12" high like a large liter box with a drop down door for easy cleaning. We started out with 4" of pine wood shavings then added as needed to keep the manure covered. Most people only clean once a year. This is our first year of cleaning it from nine months ago. I'm empressed how easy it was to clean. I pushed the liter back from the door, dropped the door down, backed my trailer up & started shoveling. I hauled away three full trailer loads to the garden. I seen very little droppings because most were already decomposed with the wood chips. It covered our entire garden of 24x50. I'll probably have to focus on my soil because of the high nitrogen now. I know chicken manure is a hot fertilizer. It will be another month or so before we plant so I think I'll be ok especially since most was already composted. Any suggestions on adding chicken manure to the garden let me know.
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I have used chicken bedding for many years. Biggest problem I've come across is using it before it has composted completely. Some oats may slip past the hens and they'll germinate in the garden if they haven't had enough heat to kill them during composting. Oats are easy to pull and they don't seed out like so many annual weeds do, so they're not a big deal.
 
Back when I was a kid and was on the farm all the corn was harvested in the ear. This meant we always had a lot of corn cobs around. We would run the cobs through the feed hammer mill with no screen in it. Would use this as bedding for the chickens and in the hog pens for farrowing. Under the roost in the chicken house we would stir it up good ever couple weeks or so. Worked for cleaning as it never stuck together. Just make sure the door your throwing it out of is not into the wind.
 
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