Chook poo hot compost
The Chook manure and sawdust pile
Some time ago Tom spend a considerable amount of time concreting the floors in our chook pens, where our chooks sleep at night. We cover the concreted floors with sawdust, which is emptied out regularly and replaced with fresh sawdust for our little egg producers.
The chook manure compost pile, watered and covered with some old carpet.
Temperature rising over 60 degrees C
Fungal Activity in the Chook Manure compost
Turning the Chook Manure Compost every couple of days
Look at this beautiful compost, ready to use after 18 days, made from just sawdust and chook (chicken) manure….
©2012 Permaculture Research Institute Sunshine Coast – Chook poo hot compost for permaculture gardens
Author: Zaia Kendall
Zaia grew up in a family of musicians in Holland, and has a background in top sport (snow skiing) and web development and design. She co-founded the PRI Luganville and PRI Sunshine Coast Inc (now PermEco Inc.) with Tom, and runs the “invisible structures”, like finances, business administration, website design and maintenance, writes articles and records and edits videos. She assists Tom in running the Kendall Permaculture Farm and supervising other volunteers. She is an active member of several musical projects and bands, involved in community music and runs percussion and marimba workshops, is the percussion leader for the Woodford Folk Festival People’s Orchestra and composes as well as plays music. She is passionate about community music and loves seeing people discover that they can play!
Hello Sir,
At our home, we have terrace garden, we use plastic drums for potting, we made many holes for it around for arieation, we placed coconut husk at base.
For potting mix we used the following combination in the ratio of 2:2:1:1:1/4
2- cocopeat
2- cow manure or biodynamic compost in few
1- red soil
1- sawdust
1/4- ash
Cocopeat we used for water absorption and for weight management since on terrace.
Sawdust, was available with us near by, so we used to manage resource and substituting cocopeat to some extant.
Though we enquired and came to know it has high carbon in CN ratio 500:1. We were assuming that if we can use cocopeat which has upto 200:1 CN ratio, we can balance it by putting green matter.
We have setup one biodigester for our kitchen waste and started putting diluted slurry for plants in our potting mix.
We have assumed that this will balance CN ratio of sawdust in our pot mix.
But we failed in our assumption and found very slow or no growth in plants. Specially we found no root growth.
So on our terrace we planned to fix this and spreaded plastic sheet under shade and poured the potting mix making layers of potting mix, fresh cowdung diluted thick in consistency, then green leaves then cowdung, repeated like this to three layers and in between we sprinkled BioDynamic CPP culture and left for More than month. In between to test we took deeper layer of soil and tried to see the response in plant growth. But there was no change. No growth at all.
Can you please suggest any solution to fix the problem with our potting mix.
What we have found all the time is that we are not able to get full knowledge and even practice experience in many steps.
Please comment.
Regards,
Shailender,
shailender_sga@yahoo.com
9640888769.
Hi Shailender, it sounds like you have done a lot of input for little return.
My thoughts are that first the materials havent been able to compost , they havent had enough time, and also there seems to be a lot of nitrogen though this would possibly have given lots of leafy growth which you havent got, so my other thought is that there isnt enough soil. Soil is your mineral bank, lots of compost is great. Plant food! However there also needs to be an ecology that will be with the soil and the minerals therein.
I myself prefer to create my compost away from my plants giving time for the process to mature and then add it to my garden/plants.
If im composting in situ then i will mulch over the top and wait for the process to finish then plant in.
I hope this helps
Tom
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