Chicken-assisted composting

Spring weeds seem to melt into organic matter in the compost pile, but by autumn, the plants have lost their succulency and have more staying power.  Depending on who you talk to, a well-built compost pile will have a carbon to nitrogen ratio of between 15:1 and 30:1 --- at this proportion, your plant matter will decompose rapidly without losing nitrogen to the air as gas.  Spring garden weeds clock in at 12:1 --- a bit higher in nitrogen than optimal, but not bad, meaning that they'll compost quickly all on their own.  In contrast, fall grasses have a C:N ratio closer to 50:1 (a lot like autumn leaves or straw), meaning that you need to add a lot of nitrogen to the autumn compost heap to get it to decay.

As chicken keepers, we're lucky to have a high nitrogen material at our beck and call --- chicken poop.  Chicken manure has a C:N ratio of 6:1, which means that it has so much nitrogen it melts into the soil without leaving much organic matter behind.  Mix your high nitrogen chicken manure with your high carbon autumn weeds and you've got the recipe for good compost again.

My method of autumn composting consists of laying down a layer of old autumn weeds on the ground in a high traffic area of the chicken pasture, letting the flock work through it for a couple of days, then repeating until my pile is built.  If you've got chicken manure from a coop stored up, you can mix the whole pile at once and might find it useful to use Klickitat County's compost waste calculator to determine the right proportions of each ingredient.  Using that calculator, I figure that 20 parts autumn grasses and 1 part chicken manure make the perfect compost pile.

The only problem I've found with using chickens to add nitrogen to my compost pile is that they tend to kick it relatively flat in the process.  Since we have plenty of space in the pasture, I just let the pile spread out, shoveling the edges back on top now and then (and turning up tasty worms for the flock in the process.)  Composting goes much more quickly with the aid of the chickens, and I've already used my spring and early summer compost on the garden.