Compost! Garden gold!

In the Barn

Last August, we cleaned out the barn and stacked all the old bedding in a huge pile.  The bedding consisted of wood shavings and straw.  As you might expect, the bedding had a good amount of chicken and duck poop in it too.  We let the pile sit there all fall and winter.  Also, last fall, we built a compost sifter.  More on that below...keep reading...here is a pic of the compost pile...

I used a lot of the compost to top off my raised beds in January but there is still a good amount of "chunky" compost left.  In case you do not know about compost, here is an infographic that shows some of the benefits of compost in the garden from Biofinch Ltd...

Compost is often referred to as "black gold" for your garden.  It will add organic matter and nutrients into your garden soil to make your plants grow better.

I wanted to try and screen out the larger pieces in the compost bin.  We built a compost screener out of a concrete mixer last fall.  Here is a video of how it works:

After screening the compost, we were able to weigh out 10 pounds and put it into large ziploc type bags.  These will be for sale in the online store.

Here is a close up pic of the finished compost.  It is still a little "chunky".  This will definitely increase your soils organic matter!

I wanted to see if there would be a difference in plants that were grown in potting soil versus potting soil with compost.  I just had to use some of the plants that I had started for my garden.  There were not many plants in the garden centers yet in mid-March when I started this experiment.  The beginning pics were taken on March 14th.

Here is some lettuce starts that I planted in 3 different types of soil.  1 is just regular potting soil. 2 is 1/2 potting soil and 1/2 compost and 3 is 2/3 potting soil and 1/3 compost.  The first pic was taken on March 14...

This pic is taken April 16th, so, about a month later...

It seems the lettuce responded well to the addition of the compost and did best with 2/3 potting soil and 1/3 compost.

These are small parsley plants on March 14th...

These are parsley plants on April 16th...yes, they are reaching for the light.  I am running out of room for all my seedlings!

It seems that the parsley did best with 1/2 potting soil and 1/2 compost.

I was able to get some strawberry plants from the garden center.  Here they are on March 14th...

Here is the strawberries on April 16th...

It seems that the strawberries responded well to the compost too.  Please, understand that these are not 
"scientific" experiments but I think you can see how the compost is some benefit to the plants.  My opinion is that using 2/3 potting soil and 1/3 compost for potted plants would be the way to go!

Duck poop advantage...

One thing that I learned recently is that duck poop can be applied directly into your garden!  I found this to be very interesting.  Chicken poop is "hot" and it must be allowed to sit and mellow out for a while before you put it into your garden or it will burn and hurt your plants.  BUT duck poop can be applied directly around your garden plants. Of course, I would not put it directly onto plants that you plan on eating right away, for example, I would not put duck poop onto my lettuce that I am getting ready to harvest.  

Ducks eat a little more than chickens which means they also poop more than chickens!  Duck poop is basically like a 2.8:2.3:1.7 NPK fertilizer.  No other livestock manure has NPK ratio this high.  I plan on using some of the water from the swimming pools, that the ducks swim in (and poop in), to water trees that I planted this past spring.  One of Mark's favorite jobs is to fill the ducks swimming pools...

The best thing about compost is that you can just leave it there and it will continue to breakdown and get even better over time!  Another thing you can do with compost is to make compost tea and use that to water your plants.  I will talk about compost tea in a future blog post...

Have an eggcellent day!

~Denise