Chicken Powered Composter cont.

As I mentioned the other day, the leaves in the chickens pen needed a little muddling. After we had filed the pen, it rained plenty for most of two weeks. All of the precipitation weighed heavily on the leaves, forming a thick matted layer that stuck itself to the ground.

We got a few rain showers earlier this morning, but the sun came out later in the afternoon and it warmed up quite nicely. Armed with a pitchfork and camera, I set out to turn the tangle of leaves. I chose to use a pitchfork instead of a rake for this job because any rake we own would either too flimsy or would uselessly clog. I believe that I chose wisely because the job took only about fifteen to twenty minutes.

Afterwards it was obvious that the leaves were well on their way. They still need to be broken down a bit more, but there was the musky smell of composting and the chickens seemed to have an easier time making their way through the heaps. I suppose that we could give it another two weeks and then it would be time to collect the lot into a more tradition compost bin.

When the leaves are removed there will obviously be nothing but bare earth in the pen. This may be a little messy when it starts to snow. I think we may look to add another batch of leaves or some straw. We'll revisit the subject when it comes about.

Bundled Up

As Kelly wrote yesterday, we drained our rain barrels. Six hundred gallons of frozen solid water isn't good for much except maybe causing the rain harvester to explode, so we thought it best to dump the water before winter. To make sure no rain or melting snow makes its way into the system before spring, we designed a nice little winter hat for the lead barrel.

We cleared the accumulated crap (sticks, leaves, pieces of shingles, a nail, and a big dried-up clump of glue) off of the screen, and layered a couple pieces of left-over row cover plastic over the top of the barrel. We secured it with a nice, classy, black plastic trash bag, and it should be good for the winter.

Wake of the Flood

Meg and I have been busy this holiday weekend with fall garden clean up. We should be good on blog topics for a least a week. One of the items on our to-do list was to drain our rain harvester before the hard freezes arrive.

This was our first year collecting rain water on a larger than average scale and it was marvelous. We mostly had a pretty wet summer here in southeasten Pennsylvania, but we got hit by an unabated dry spell from the end of July through most of August. With close to 600 gallons of water in reserve, our garden thrived. We're hoping to construct another rain harvesting system to feed off of the shed in the lower section of the yard.

In the meantime we want to make sure that the plumbing on our current harvester is free of water so the pipes don't burst this winter. The barrels were completely full and took six to seven hours to drain. (The middle photo was taken right when I turned on the water. It actually comes out much stronger, but gravity is our pump and sometimes it takes a minute or two to really get going.) That's a whole lot of water. Some time tomorrow we'll cap the lead barrel and divert the downspout. I also left the spigot turned on so that any condensation in the system would be free to drain.

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!

They All Fall Down

The trees around here put on a lackluster display for most of the season. Some of the trees that usually look fantastic sort of just turned brown and crapped out a few weeks into October. In the past week, though, the holdouts have really been putting on a show.

The poplars (and check out that moon!)

A Japanese maple...

...and another

The holly

Yet another Japanese maple