Compost day
Much to my father’s disappointment, we are really not on top of our compost game. We have dabbled in composting, primarily because we have animals. But we have never really taken it seriously as a practice. We tend to just throw a lot of things in a big pile and wait it out. Luckily, in the world of compost, this actually works. We have a large area cordoned off using extra fence panels into which we scoop the chicken coop litter and the plants pulled from the garden. We don’t feed it with any miscellaneous kitchen scraps, for example, because we have chickens that eat all of that. The area tends to be “out of sight, out of mind”.
Plus, we had the long fence section just bungee corded closed so that we could just swing it open for easy access. We don’t even have t-posts securing it. For that reason, chickens and even goats would just regularly squeeze through the corner and pick around or just hang out on top of the compost pile. It was honestly a mess.
So when I am starting to think about fall prep and need a few tractor buckets of compost, I was not optimistic we would even be able to find anything usable in this pit. But I was happily surprised to find that time has done its job, and we were able to get a nice little pile to add to our garden beds. I don’t actually need the compost for another month or so, but we have new baby chicks coming next week (surprise!), so I need to clean out the chicken coop and get things ready for them. So we wanted to pull out three buckets of usable compost before I add three more buckets of used chicken coop straw!
Montana has a long stack of sticks along the back of the compost, artifacts from her tree pruning hobby.
Steve uses the scraper along the back to level out the gravel in the driveways.
We had to dig down a bit, but there was good stuff in there. And yes, I also helped with this step!
After pulling out the three bucketloads we needed, Steve used the buckets to scrape and dump the area up before re-securing the front “gate”.
Much better secured and contained!
Don’t let him fool you - he LOVES any project that involves the Kubota!
Bigfoot will keep an eye on this pile until we need it in the garden, at which time we will use wheelbarrows to move it in. Also pictured: One of Steve’s HAM radio antennas, very photographic.
And one related task that has no photographic evidence because I AM THE ONE who does all of the nasty work is scooping out all of the chicken coop bedding. That is a dusty terrible job. Steve pulls the tractor up, I fill the bed, he dumps it in the compost, I whimper a little as I step outside for some clean air, and we repeat. Seven times! But now the coop is spiffy, but sadly look what we did to our nice clean compost pile!
