The dry weather means I’m not digging beds so much, and as I mentioned in my last post, my thoughts turned to making more compost. My friends Phil and Lindy have a most impressive setup, with masonry bays, chutes and what have you, but they have a lot of animals and a big family. For me, it’s just important to get started, and I can upgrade later.
My resources are; waste hay from the chicken pen, hay from slashing, and muck from the bottom of the dam. To make the whole thing easier I built two bays just over the chicken yard fence, at the top of a vegetable garden, so I don’t have to carry the soiled hay far and I will have a downhill feed for the finished compost into beds. It also has the driveway directly uphill, so it’s easy to cart ingredients there and drop them in.
As you can see it’s no grand structure, but hopefully will do the job. I used star pickets, paired up at the front so I could slot in the old floorboards that make up the sides. The wood is suspended at the front with wire threaded through the picket holes. and at the back the boards sit in the fence wire squares. I hope that the open structure will help with aeration, particularly when we have the very wet weather that us usual here.
I have been piling the chicken house clean-outs just approximately in the spot, so they made the first layer of my new compost heap. By the way, I find hay very good for lining the chicken house, as it is easy to pick up the soiled parts (under the roosts) as a single mass and carry it out. I used wood shavings first up, which are a very fine and clean base, but I would have to rake or shovel that out, which would be dusty and unpleasant. That pile of hay was bone dry and was not heading towards compost anytime soon, so that got me thinking about something to add some moisture, at least until it rains, so I put in a bag of muck from the dam, which also weighed the dry straw down a bit. After I took the main photo I came back with a rake and spread it out evenly.
By then I was on a bit of a compost roll, so I cleaned out the chicken house and made a new manure layer, but that all seemed a bit dry again, and besides they always say you need to put in green as well as brown waste (although the hay is really green, just dried out). So I got out my line trimmer and cut down a particularly lush stand of grass that I had had my eye on, filled up a trailer with fresh green grass, an piled that on top to finish my cake. It might act as a bit of thatch to shed any heavy rain, too.
Now I will see how much this bay settles, but I reckon it’s ready to ferment, and I can start with layering in bay 2.
I think one thing is for certain, in a big garden you can always use more compost.