Sign up to get all the latest gardening tips! Chicken manure for vegetable garden fertilizing will produce excellent soil for your vegetables to grow in. It is best to compost for a year before using the material in your garden. In 2014, she and her husband moved to their forever home in the country. Spread the material on the soil surface, and the micro-organisms and other life in the soil should do the rest of the work for you – recycling the nutrients into the system and incorporating the material into the soil. This post may contain affiliate links. The plants that will benefit from chicken manure are those which require a lot of nitrogen. Getting the right ratio allows them to successfully break down. Fresh chicken manure can be rather pungent and it is certainly not something that you want in proximity to edible plants, nor in regularly tended areas. Read more articles about Composting Manures. Interestingly, you can consider making use of the heat generated by decomposing manure. If you do not own chickens, you can locate a farmer who owns chickens and they will most likely be happy to give you the used chicken bedding. In addition to designing gardens, Elizabeth also works in a consultancy capacity, offering ongoing support and training for gardeners and growers around the globe. Work the compost into the soil with either a shovel or a tiller. Chicken manure is an excellent source of nitrogen – one of the three main nutrients essential for plant growth. Chicken manure for vegetable garden fertilizing will produce excellent soil for your vegetables to … When she is not gardening, Elizabeth spends a lot of time working remotely on permaculture garden projects around the world. In a no dig garden system, the organic material is spread on the surface of your garden, rather than being tilled or dug into the topsoil layers. Sign up for our newsletter. Whether you have it as a byproduct of your poultry, or buy it in, using chicken manure in the correct ways can bring great benefits to your garden. (In a hot bed, chicken manure and straw/wood chips or other carbon rich material are contained, below an area of compost/ top soil into which seeds or plants can be placed. This is one way to heat the space. Raw chicken manure fertilizer can burn, and even kill plants. It’s essential to prepare your chicken coop and run so that you create the right environment for making high-grade compost from your chook manure. Keep reading to learn more about chicken manure compost and how to use it in the garden. Firstly, and most importantly, like other manures, chicken manure can contain bacteria and other pathogens. This means more can be grown over winter in colder climates. Chicken manure, when handled properly, can be a very useful resource to a gardener. It also depends on how long it has been rotted or composted before use. Composting manure before you use it, or simply allowing it to rot, reduces health risks and benefits the garden, too. Don’t add chicken manure to ericaceous (acid loving) plants such as azaleas, hydrangeas or blueberries, as it typically has a slightly alkaline pH. This can be particularly beneficial for perennials with high nitrogen needs, like plum trees and blackcurrants, for example. (4% ammoniacal nitrogen, 2% phosphorus pentoxide and 1% potassium oxide). When used with plenty of compost , these composted and processed pellets are an excellent cure for tired soil. To reduce the chances of contamination, use chicken manure that was composted with high heat -- at least 131 degrees Fahrenheit -- for at least 15 days. Keeping chickens on your homestead gives you far more than just eggs (and potentially meat). Chicken manure composting gives the manure time to break down some of the more powerful nutrients so that they are more usable by the plants. Some of these, like salmonella, can pose a serious threat to human health. You will find that your vegetables will grow bigger and healthier as a result of using chicken manure fertilizer. Just one more reason why chickens can be such a useful addition to a homestead or any garden system. It is important to understand the properties of the manure, and to age it or compost it before it is used. In fall, you can also spread manure. Chicken manure fertilizer is very high in nitrogen and also contains a good amount of potassium and phosphorus. 14 Ways To Make Money From Your Backyard Chickens. C hicken manure pellets, a.k.a. Fresh droppings from your hens are too high in nitrogen and will burn your vegetables so must be allowed to break-down into a more plant-friendly state. Find more gardening information on Gardening Know How: Keep up to date with all that's happening in and around the garden. You can also run water pipes through a hot composting pile to heat water prior to running those pipes into the growing areas in a greenhouse. As chickens forage and scratch beneath fruit trees and bushes, they will provide smaller amounts of fertilizer for free. Fortunately, it is very easy to compost chicken manure so that it is safe for people and plants and can be spread around your growing areas or used in other ways in your garden. The next step in chicken manure composting is to take the used bedding and put it into a compost bin. As the materials break down, add new bedding material on top. Alternatively, choose manure that has aged for at least a year. You can also use the composted manure to make new garden beds, hugelkultur mounds or other growing areas. Successfully composting chicken manure can also be achieved through a deep litter bed in a coop or run. Lastly, though it is lesser than the above concerns, there is the issue of smell. Chicken manure (when used correctly) can add vital nutrients and unlike synthetic fertilizers, it can also aid your garden in other ways. Alternatively, you can use a typical cold composting heap or bin. Elizabeth Waddington is a writer, permaculture designer and green living consultant. I keep a flock of up to 15 rescue chickens in my productive forest garden, for their manure as well as for their eggs. However, a wide range of plants will benefit from the nitrogen and other nutrients the manure can provide. Left unattended, the … It is an organic matter that can improve drainage in heavy clay soils, and help free-draining soils by improving water retention. This is basically a form of composting in place. The exact amount of time it takes for composting chicken manure depends on the conditions under which it is composted.