Allotment Gardening Advice Help Chat
Growing => Grow Your Own => Topic started by: Robbo on September 08, 2013, 13:42
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if we use chicken poo (mixed with shavings) does it make the soil ACID or ALkALINE ? what can we use to balance It ?
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Fresh chicken poo is too strong to use and fresh wood shavings would rob the soil of nitrogen as they rot down, so not ideal as fertiliser I'm afraid.
I use a slat sided compost bin and stack the wood shavings and poo from my chickens to weather down into mulch, or you can layer it with green waste to make compost. Either way, after 6 months or so, its good stuff. For the mulch, leave the top uncovered so the rain can get in. For the compost, cover to keep the heat in :)
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I plant in aged hen poo and bedding. It makes a good basis for growing stuff. I kept it stashed in builders rubble sacks. Then when it's full I planted in it. This year was Carcasson garlic. It looks very fine when it's rotted down and for all the world like bagged compost. I have used the builders bag "raised beds" three years running so it's good value. You can top dress with fresh growbag, or homemade compost, if you wish if you're growing a greedy feeder like courgettes or squash
Now that the compost has been used three times I've emptied the lot out into my new raised beds and then made fresh sowings into it. Everything has come up beautifully so I'm well chuffed. My hens are in heaven now but their legacy lives on :D
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Actually, fresh chicken poo will quickly rot down any shavings and essentially neutralize itself. But you can't apply it around growing crops, far too strong. I get a load of this stuff every fall and apply it in fall after I've cleared out my garden and let it rot down over winter (no winter planting here) and it's fine by spring with a very healthy crop of earth worms wiggling around. I've also put a thick layer in my raised beds and my plants went wild this year. I mean, who needs 20 spaghetti squash from 2 plants? Or 20 red kuri squash? And I've got filet beans up the wazoo.
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This raised bed is filled with hen muck and bedding. It's a few years old too, having been in a builder's rubble sack growing garlic for the past two years and courgettes the year before that. I thought it might be ok for sowing in though and here is the result. Clearly it's still fertile even when quite old :D
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I keep all my shavings and chicken poo layered up in a hot darlek with kitchen leafy waste and egg shells etc - your usual composting stuff and after 12 months it looks and feels great as roughage for the raised beds on my plot.
My first ever successful celeriac got a dose of this homemade compost and us doing really really well. :happy: