Black Gold in the Chicken House

Despite the continued nose hair freezing temperatures at the farmette, the seed catalogues in the mail combined with the fact that it is still light at 6pm AND we have seen the sun almost every day this past week, have given me a giddy hopefulness that Spring really is coming.  I took the opportunity on one of the recent warm days to clean out the chicken house in order to harvest some of that composted black gold Martha Stewart promised I would have if I implemented the deep litter method for the chickens this winter.

For those of you unfamiliar with deep litter in the chicken house, the idea is that you keep adding bedding so the chickens have a nice thick layer of bedding throughout the winter. The chickens scratch around in it, thus composting their manure, and they have the added benefit of a nice warm place to hang out since the composting manure causes the temperature to rise.  Another plus of deep bedding is that it attracts good microbes that will break down the manure and eat mites and other pests that might attack your chickens.  It is a win-win-win-win.  The chickens are warm, I don't have to clean out the chicken house as much, we have a nitrogen rich compost for the garden and the chickens are healthier.

This miracle of nature would have worked perfectly except for the fact that one should never, ever use hay as a means of deep litter in the chicken house.

When I decided to go the deep litter route, I researched what bedding would make the best addition to the garden.  As many of you know, my thumb has been more yellow than green when it comes to my garden; Yellow as in the color of the leaves of my broccoli plants due to the low ph of my soil.  While a good pruning and lack of late frost means a bumper crop of the acid loving blueberries, the rest of my garden cries for 7.0 soil.

 Even though most people tend to go the wood shavings route, I decided to do hay in the chicken house because A: we had a bunch already and B: I read that wood shavings in the garden would actually rob the soil of even more nutrients. What I got was C: a frozen non-absorbant carpet of muck that I had to get down on my hands and knees to roll up and drag out of the chicken house into a big heavy stinky mound next to the door.

As I grunted and pulled the frozen hay out the door, I was convinced the problem was the husband's watering system.  He rigged up a five gallon bucket with nipples on the bottom that has a heated rod attached to the lid so the water doesn't freeze.  While it was in fact true that one of the buckets had some leaky nipples (which I made sure to point out in a not at all haughty way) even I had to admit that there was no way a couple of leaky nipples could have caused the entire floor of the chicken house to be wet.  It had to be  GASP! my fault.

Back to the drawing board or the internet and the local Feed N Seed as the case may be.     After some research, I had a plan.  First,  I spread a thin layer of sand on the floor to help with absorption and then a thick layer of pine shavings which I add to weekly.  The ladies love scratching around in their new litter and while I wouldn't be bottling the aroma as perfume, it doesn't smell so bad for having 40 plus chickens

Once composted, the manure laden bedding should be an ideal addition to the garden.  Here is hoping for some bright green broccoli and lots of asparagus to go with my scrambled eggs in the near future.