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Writer's pictureTerri Pendleton

Coop Poop

I'm finally getting my shit together.

We have something like 30 chickens right now, and a large coop that accumulates a lot of chicken waste all the damn time. This last year my friend Amy gave us a giant composter, so we started tossing all that used bedding full of coop poop into the composter and letting it do its thing.

Chicken manure compost is awesome. It's full of nitrogen, and even when the bedding doesn't break down as fast as the poop, it adds a nice amount of filler that breaks up the crappy compacted soil we have around here. So it's super cool that we will be getting all that good dirt. It's also nice that I get a reward for cleaning out the damn coop, which is gross and smelly and not crazy fun.

It takes a while for that poop to break down, and I want good compost for the spring, so I need the stuff in there now to spend the next few weeks breaking down without new poop going in. Meanwhile, the chickens keep pooping. You can't put that new poop directly into the garden when there are plants in it, because the nitrogen load is so high it will burn them. However, in the winter, there are no plants in the garden.

So I did a little research and found out it's fine to put raw chicken manure into garden beds if you won't be using them for a while. That means I can put all that new shit directly into the garden beds right now and let it compost there. It gets to spend the next two months breaking down all that nitrogen into useable amounts, and while it's doing that, the extra strength nitrogen will also smother and kill any leftover weeds currently growing out there. And I get to feel like a super genius.


So that is what I did today. Now I've got a clean coop, a giant composter full of almost soil, and a garden full of brand new chicken shit. Plus I have officially earned my nap today.

I love having my shit together!

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