I'm not sure I understand...

Are you trying to create two things...a new worm bin and a place for composting/getting rid of goat bedding?

If you live in a rural area, why are you not just making a big compost pile/bin with all of this stuff, adding in some (lots) of browns to just let it do its thing? (If you're not wanting to do vermicomposting.)

Vermicomposting is something I've only read about but it does seem that worms prefer temps in the 70's and the chicken/goat poo would really heat up a lot more than that. Have you checked the vermicomposting forum? I remember reading that a guy put a frozen plastic jug in his too hot worm bin to cool it off...

The link below is to our ongoing thread about using beneficial indigenous microorganisms and lacto bacillis bacteria for gardens and animals.

http://forums2.gardenweb.com/forums/load/soil/msg0219021917181.html?70

I think you'll be VERY interested in the info on this link, especially about the chickesns (and could be for goats...) and the use of lacto bacillis to treat the bedding in piggerys (or goat houses?) and chicken coops...making good compost with no smell.

In a nutshell, you can collect lacto bacillis bacteria from the air (read WAY down in the thread for an easy to understand version of how to do it) or drain the whey from yogurt or kefir and mix it with unchlorinated/de-chlorinated water (rain, well water, etc) and spray in your chicken coop/goat house. Also, note how they feed their chicks. Most interesting.

Hope this is of some use!

Penny

P.S. The link below is a great visual on what they do with the LB (Lacto Bacillis bacteria) in chicken houses in Korea.

Here is a link that might be useful: Janong Institute

I think what they mean is chicken poop is know to be really high in N and can burn the plants I think most compost or age 12 months and or they are carful with it

as far as worms you can check out the vermicomposting forum I like my worm bin in the basment I can still compost when its -40

Here is a link that might be useful: worm forum

Hi Msjay2u. I spread my chicken poop directly onto my garden each fall. I wait until things are pretty well dormant to put it into the perennial beds. My sister-in-law has goats and she uses here goat poop directly in all her beds.

I use only a small amount for composting. Why waste it?

Regarding your trees, it really is not a good idea to smother the area of tree roots. They need to determine for themselves where their roots are in relationship to the surface of the soil....many needing to be slightly above ground. My sister-in-law uses portable pens to move her goats around the yard so that they can take care of extra growth. They seem happy and I am thinking about getting a few myself.

Kay

I had a brilliant idea to add some red wriggler worms to my compost bin so that it could speed up the process and I can have compost by the spring because they thrive in rotting vegetation, compost, and manure.

Like the others, I'm not sure I understand either but it sounds like you are confusing, or trying to mix, composting (which doesn't require or use worms, at least not intentionally), and vermicomposting (worm composting). Just pile it up (the chicken manure), add some brown carbon materials like fall leaves, straw, or cardboard, mix it up once in awhile, and let it cook for 6 months. Then put it on the garden.

I would be very careful with chicken manure, as it can heat up fast and cook your worms, depending on what kind of bin you are setting up. I don't know how well pine bedding would decompose and that combo could be too acidic.

True on the heat part but no big deal on the acidic part. As it decomposes it reverts to neutral.

spread some cardboard at the base of the trees and put a good bit of the straw mixed with goat manure around it about 2-3' out maybe 6" high

Nope. Sorry, not a good idea as Kay said. Yeah it may keep down the weeds but it can also kill the tree. Instead just add the goat manure to the compost pile and let it cook along with the chicken. By the following year you'll have some great stuff for the garden. For more details on using manure safely in food gardens, check out the link below as it contains links to many previous discussions on manure composting and safety.

Hope this is some help.

Dave

Here is a link that might be useful: Using manure in the home garden discussions

I am trying to get rid of everything as easily as possible. Goat manure can go directly in the garden without being composted. I need to get rid of the straw in the pen and I do not have an area of my yard that is hidden anywhere. I think a pile of straw is going to look unsightly! The only thing I could think of is putting it around trees. What about around my hedges? I know landscapers do that (with mulch) because they just did it where I work. It is about 2' deep!!

6 months to compost chicken poop? I was hoping for 3 mos at best. I was thinking the worms would speed the process up but I guess that was a bad idea! Do you know any way to speed it up?

I liked that natural farming link. It looked so interesting and I wish there was more info. I did not go to all the links but I will tomorrow. Thanks for your input.

Is there any chance a part of your garden could be used to incorporate a manure/straw mixture into the soil? I've read of a concept where strip areas of a garden are used to sheet compost and then planted the following year. Sort of like a fallow rotation some farmers use.

Lloyd (not a gardener)

It's referred to as pit or trench composting here but I was envisioning tilling the mixture in.

Lloyd

Trees should be fed at the dripline of the trees. The drip line is the edge of the leaves where the rainwater drips off onto the ground.

In regards to the pine bedding digdirt is correct to a point."no big deal on the acidic part. As it decomposes it reverts to neutral." The point is that the liquid that is formed with the fermentation is acid. The remains of the pine needles are neutral.

I think the easiest way to get rid of it all is to put it in a pile together. The goat and chicken manure will be your "greens" and the straw is your "brown".

The worms won't want to be there until the pile has cooled off.

The main reason such a long time is recommended is because of the risk of contaminating food crops with pathogens that may be in the manure.

Maybe this will help with the chicken poop. It is a summary of how to use Lacto bacilli to get the chicken poop deomposing in the chicken house, help eliminate some odor, and help your chickens' health.

This is summarized from the Gil Carandong paper on the link above, with an alteration.

1. Get or make some plain yogurt--doesn't matter whether it is fat free or full fat or inbetween. Make sure it has live cultures. (Dannon and Stoneyfield do). NO flavors. (This is the alternative to gathering LB from the air..)

2. Put a sieve over a bowl and line the sieve with a coffee filter.

3. Pour yogurt into sieve and let the whey drain out. Depending on how long you let it drain, you will end up with more whey/stiffer "yo-cheese" product (which you can eat or feed to chickens) or less whey/firmer yogurt product that resembles Greek yogurt. Eat it yourself of feed to the chickens (and goats) if you don't like yogurt.
(If you use a quart of yogurt and let it drain a couple of days in the fridge you will end up with close to 2 cups of whey.)

2. Two options with the whey. Store the pure whey in the fridge or mix 1:1 with unsulphured molasses to keep at room temp without it going anerobic.

3. If using pure whey, mix 1.2t per 2 gallons unchlorinated water (like in a typical 2 gal pump sprayer). If using the molasses/whey mix, mix 2.4 (2.5 for ease) in two gal sprayer. Spray the chicken house floor...how often? I would do as much as possible at first to really get the LB bacteria working in there.

You can also use this same mixture for the chickens' water. It will be like natural antibiotic, good for their digestion according to the paper. It is supposed to be particularly effective against Salmonella and E coli.

Refer back to that Janong article to look how they are HANDLING the chicken litter from the house. They also use it in piggerys to eliminate odor.

As for the pile of straw...

a. Perhaps you can screen it off with some split bamboo fencing (not too pricey) or another alternative...free wooden pallets?

http://www.backwoodshome.com/articles2/sawyer69.html

or, if you need taller, this one:

http://summerville-novascotia.com/PalletWoodShed/

But, if you add the right stuff to the straw pile (as mentioned above) you will have some incredible compost...and the straw pile will continually be shrinking..

Thank you Luckygal and RJ over on the other thread for coming up with the "one step" method of dealing with the LB...

Here is a link that might be useful: split bamboo fence

OK, to answer your first question, yes chicken litter will get quite hot and cook the worms. 1lb of reds isn't going to take care of it as fast as the chickens make it. There are quite a few vermicompost forums a good one here at gw and these two are also quite good.

A vermicompost bin takes months to get established, during that time they live in the initial bedding you make for them and really can't take on any food scraps.

As suggested above, a hot compost pile sounds like the answer, a windrow might be good too. What you have now will be good and ready for next years garden.

A compost pile or windrow can be seeded w/ many pounds of reds and other types ENC's or EH's they will move away from the heat, they also will show up on their own. The problem w/ your original query is that in a bin, they have no where to escape from the heat.

I started w/ a worm bin and ended up w/ several compost piles and a bin. Now I add a bit of finished compost for the worms to eat at one end and harvest from the other. I occasionally give them some coffee grounds or pieces of pumpkin I froze for them last fall, but the majority of every thing else goes in the piles.

I'm finsihing my raised beds today and am going to seed them w/ handfuls of worms and vermicompost from the bin.

Make sure you check out the LB thread mentioned above.

If just "getting rid of it" rather than producing usable compost is your goal and you aren't comfortable with a having a compost pile anywhere on the property (although I'd bet many of your country neighbors have one) then Lloyds suggestion of sheet composting is a great one.

Just take a corner of the property and spread out thin alternate layers of the manures and the straw - like a sheet - and let it decompose in place. By next year you'll have a great planting bed there.

Composting and the decomposition it requires takes time - no way around it. Sure you can add all sorts of activators to it to speed it up a bit, but it still isn't going to happen in less than several months. If you don't want to use the manured compost on food crops then you can use it on flower beds, shrubs and the like at 3 months.

But if you want to use it on food crops then 6 months minimum is recommended because of the pathogens in it.

Goat manure can go directly in the garden without being composted.

No, that standard recommendation of 6 months composting applies to ALL animal manures. So if you use the goat manure fresh in the food garden, you do so at your own risk.

Dave