Composted chicken manure will benefit your garden.
Flower gardens are a great source of pride, and a vegetable garden is a way to stretch your budget and enjoy fresh produce. But growing a vegetable or flower garden involves more than dropping seeds into the ground. If you want an abundance of healthy plants, soil and fertilizer matter. This is one project that literally starts from the ground up. Does this Spark an idea?
Benefits
Chicken manure provides nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium to a garden. If collected daily or weekly, it will provide an ongoing ingredient for a compost pile. Once cured and added to the soil, the manure increases the capacity for the soil to maintain water and is an inexpensive fertilizer. If you live near a chicken farmer, he will most likely allow you free fertilizer if you collect and haul it.
Compost
Chicken manure must be composted before it can be used as fertilizer. The average curing time is between six to nine months, but it's best to allow the manure to compost for 12 months. The most basic recipe for compost is one part brown -- carbon -- to two parts green -- nitrogen. "Brown" refers to the bedding used for the chickens, such as dry leaves, sawdust or straw. Green is the actual chicken manure. Since chicken manure is high in nitrogen and will burn plants if not broken down, you can change the basic recipe to a combination more suitable to your plants' needs if necessary. The recipe can be changed to equal parts of green and brown, or two parts brown and one part green. Monitor the compost pile to maintain a temperature of 130 to 150 degrees Fahrenheit.
Garden
Prepare the garden site by tilling the soil and removing weeds. Apply the composted manure evenly over the garden and mix it thoroughly with the garden soil. Mixing can be done by hand with a garden spade or a tiller. Flowers and plants will thrive from the mixture of manure in your garden soil.
Warnings
Fresh or improperly composted chicken manure is not only harmful to plants but also to humans. Manure that is not completely composted could contain organisms and contaminate root produce, such as carrots, beets and radishes. The leaves on lettuce, spinach and other leafy plants can also be contaminated. Always wash vegetables before eating them raw, and wear gloves when gathering vegetables.
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