Deep bedding in the garden
Someday,
I'll let the deep
bedding in our
chicken coops rot all the way down into high quality compost. But
it won't be this year.
As usual, I need more
biomass than I have on hand, so I'm mining the chicken coops
early. I figure the half-composted mixture of manure, leaves, and
straw will work as both compost and mulch for our blueberries.
(It certainly did a good job underneath our peach tree last year.)
In the coop, I used the
pitchfork to pull back the top six inches or so of bedding, then
scooped out the partly broken down material underneath. I caught
the faintest hint of 
ammonia (a sign that I let a
pocket of manure get too thick before adding more bedding), but
otherwise felt like I was working with good quality leaf mold.
My blueberries are in
mulched wide rows, but I don't think their roots have colonized all of
the intervening space between plants yet. So I made circles of
deep bedding material around each bush, then filled in the gaps with
magnolia leaves my mom had picked up on her city curb.
I wonder if I'll have
enough deep bedding to finish the whole blueberry patch?
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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One can never have enough mulch can they?
It seems like we are always struggling to make enough compost... One of the projects I have in mind for this year is new compost bins, the ones we have now have been good, but I think we've outgrown them.
Love the blog!