UFC: Ultimate Feathered Composter

See all those leaves? You know what they mean? Oh, yes, it's Chicken Composter time! The brilliant plan this year was to stuff the chickens' pen full of all the Fall leaves we could get, let the birds stomp and chomp them up, and wind up with boatloads of compost in not much time.

Kelly's brother Derrek and I raked for about an hour, and managed to cover about 1/6th of the yard. We made six massive piles. It took another hour to transport them all down to the coop. First, we raked the piles onto big tarps.

Then we hauled them through the yard and stuffed the big bundles of leaves through the door to the chicken run. (And by "we" I mean Kelly, Derrek, and Steveo. Someone's got to take photos.)

At first the chickens were terrified of the big blue tarp, and they huddled together in the corner of their pen.

They didn't really know what to make of the situation. They caught on soon, though, and started mowing through the leaves as we filled up the pen.

This is literally 400 cubic feet of leaves, minus the volume of the three chickens that are buried within:

That will give the ladies something to do all day now that they've had enough time to destroy their grass, and we should have sweet sweet compost by the Spring. Thanks, chickies!