I'm still working the kinks out of my garden bed mulch plan.  Leaves are awesome (when you can get enough), but they really need an input of nitrogen to decompose well.

The method I used while away on our honeymoon worked pretty well.  We filled the chicken tractors up with leaves and let the hens shred and fertilize them, then shoveled the resultant goop onto garden beds.  The downside of this method is that it requires two rounds of leaf movement, and I'm always trying to handle our soil amendments as few times as possible.

Lately, I've been trying a different method.  I've been letting the chicken tractor sit on a bare raised bed for a few days, then moving the chicken tractor on and covering the poopy soil with freshly raked leaves.  I hope that the unshredded, unmixed leaves will still decompose due to the high nitrogen poop under them.

Of course, the real problem is that I want my garden completely covered ASAP, at least within the next few weeks.  And I just don't have enough chickens to poop on each bed in that time period.  Drat!  What shall I do?

Want more in-depth information? Browse through our books.

Or explore more posts by date or by subject.

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.



Want to be notified when new comments are posted on this page? Click on the RSS button after you add a comment to subscribe to the comment feed, or simply check the box beside "email replies to me" while writing your comment.

Powered by Branchable Wiki Hosting.