The Refill

As promised, here are some photos of the chicken composter refill.

With the leaves already bagged, the process was a snap. There was no raking involved, because the leaves had been confiscated from a neighbor who already had them bagged. Each of the bags I'm emptying here couldn't have weighed more than 30-35 pounds; and it took maybe eight of them to fill the pen back up. I'm guessing that once the leaves break down we will have over 250 pounds of compost from this one round alone. Multiply that by three batches (There are about ten more bags waiting for the next load which will hopefully be in about a month) plus the stuff we made at the end of last year and you've got yourself a shit load compost.

I can't even begin to express how easy this whole process has been. With the two of us working together, each flip took only a few hours. After everything is said and done, I'm figuring that we will probably invest only a day in labor. Hmm, over 1,000 pounds of compost for one day of work; it feels like we're cheating.

Chicken Composter Update

The leaves in our chicken powered composter are beyond ready to go into a more traditional compost bin. Using the chickens to compost our leaves has been a huge success. I suspect that as soon as the temperatures rises above 60° Fahrenheit , the final break down will be quick. The only snag to the experiment has been that the ground, and the leaves along with it, have kept us from being able to gather them up with any hopes of reasonable success. As I may have said in a previous post, at least one more round of leaves will go into rotation before spring. Afterwards we're thinking of planting rye in the pen. While the rye sets, the chickens will earn their keep in the garden scratching through the beds before we start planting.

Warmer Weather Approaches

Apparently the area where Meg and I live will be in for some unusually warm weather this weekend. I learned this while talking to Steveo outside, freezing our asses off, this afternoon. While conversing about the family, food, and drink of the holidays, he said that he heard on the weather station that we will be expecting Saturday to hit 50°F and the days to follow will get steadily warmer.

Meg and I agreed that we would be fools not to take advantage of the heat wave and get some much needed work done outside. As we've said in earlier posts, we inherited more leaves that need composting attention and the shredded leaves in the chicken pen are ready to be gathered. Before any of this can go on we need to make room for it all.

We decided that the best place for some new compost bins would be on the northern end of the garden. This is actually where we kept our cache of composting leaves last year before we shoveled it out and stored it for next spring. I don't want to say to much about it until we see how it plans to turn out.

What we're intending to do is make two 3'x3' bins on the left side of the fence (top photo) and a third 3'x3' bin on the right. The reason for the spacing is because we are going to make a second gate in the middle so we can access that part of the garden more easily for watering and what have you. The building of the bins shouldn't take too long, but the leaf swapping may take a few hours. Like I said, I'm not to sure how it will go until we get to it, but hopefully by the weekend we'll have five compost bins going.

Compost Update

The leaves in our chicken composter are ready to be hauled out. As you can see in the top photo, the chickens did a remarkable job of shredding, stomping, shitting, etc. I like seeing the contrast between the leaves in the pen to those just on the other side of the fence. Once we pull this load of leaves, I believe we will fill the pen again with the leaves we acquired yesterday from our neighbor. The two rounds of chicken-pen-leaves plus the 100 gallons of compost (bottom photo) from earlier in the year should last us through all of next year. I know that we plan to cover all of our beds with a couple inches at planting time and the rest will probably be used when we rotate the crops come late summer.

Jackpot

We arrived home from Pittsburgh to find a note from Chris, our landlord, stuck in our door: "Meg and Kelly, Tom [a neighbor] has many bags of leaves waiting by his garage to be taken if you're interested. Too much for me to carry alone." This afternoon when we came back from the grocery store there was another: "There are now more than 13 bags of leaves in Tom's yard (As of 3:02PM)."

We are always interested in getting more leaves for our ongoing compost projects and Chris seemed especially intent on us picking up leaves from Tom (whose German shepherd was once attacked and chased away by our chickens, incidentally), so this afternoon we dragged the yard cart up the road to get them. We ended up with twenty huge bags of leaves, and there are still about ten big piles on the ground in Tom's yard waiting for us if we want them. We're stashing them near the shed until we find a drier home for them, and in the spring they'll be turned into piles of nice new compost.

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.

Misty Morning

Its been raining for a few days so there hasn't been much outdoor activity to post about. The rain is helping with the leaf project going on in the chicken coop. The wet is weighing the leaves down and softening them up. I think we're planning to fluff them back up with a rake when the weather dries out. This muddling should help in assisting the chickens with the shredding end of the business.

What To Do With Leaves

Maybe ten years or so ago, our landlord planted a row of four paulownias behind the house. He planted these gigantic weeds to replace the shade that was lost when a pair of tulip poplars fell. The reason he chose to substitute the poplars for paulownias is quite simple; he wanted big trees fast. The paulownia can grow up to thirty feet in just three years. Unfortunately thirty feet isn't quite tall enough to shade the third floor where Meg and I live so he could have planted moss for as much as shade is concerned.

If you can't tell by my tone, I really don't think to much of the paulownia. While the leaves on every tree in our yard are changing colors, the paulownias are slowly changing from green to shit. Pretty soon we'll get a real hard frost and then every leaf will croak and fall. Actually when they fall it is quite fascinating. Since the leaves are so large and dense, when they fall, they fall fast and loud. The sound isn't deafening, but you certainly know something serious is going down in your back yard.

Last year was our first paulownia experience. After the great fall, Meg and I went outside to check it out and I remember thinking, "Wow, that's a shit load of leaves." There was never any question what we were going to do with them. No organic gardener in their right mind would not see this pile of leaves as anything other than sweet sweet compost. However, there's a small catch.



These leaves are f@&*ing huge. I wonder if I could use a few of them to patch the leaky roof?

Anything we've either heard or read about composting says that the fastest way to get good compost is to do a great deal of the breaking down of the materials before you add it to the pile. Mike McGrath suggests running your leaves through a shredder to chop them up real small. That sounds great, but Meg and I aren't too keen on the idea of using gas or electric power in our garden unless it is absolutely necessary. Sorry Mike.

Last year we put the leaves in a big pile and covered it with grass clippings. Every so often we would turn the leaves to encourage the braking down process, but ultimately it took all summer to get good compost. This year we plan to to shred the leaves, but instead of using gas or electric, we plan on using...



Chicken power! We figure that if we fill their pen with a foot thick layer of leaves, they'll have it shredded far better than any machine in less than a day. John Henry would be so proud. When this experiement takes place, we'll be sure to take some photos and post. Hot damn I can't wait!