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What do you do with your remains when you clean out your chickens? If I add them to the compost bin, it dies, but feel it is counter productive to put them in the wheelie bin, so how do you compost/break down yours?
I use shavings on the floor of my shed, so it is chicken poo mixed with wood shavings

I use hemcore which looks similar to wood shavings, but breaks down fairly quickly to compost.
At the mo, I am spreading it around the base of my fruit bushes to suppress weeds, and a fair bit goes in the compost bins.

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updated 14 May 2008

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I can't understand what you mean by your compost bin dying. I regularly add large quantities of poultry manure to my compost. It works as an activator and improves the quality of the resultant compost hugely. I also use it as a light mulch around my onions and as a heavier mulch on my comfrey bed. My poultry manure is always bone-dry and friable; I'm not sure how it would work in a wet state, but I suspect it would be all right.

Most of the "sweepings" from the coop go into the compost bin and I haven't had any problems so far. I use wood shavings on the floor of the coop and shredded junk mail in the nest box and there's always a certain amount of mix-up but it all goes the same way. I've also recently added a new raised bed in my veggie plot and put a thick layer of sweepings in the bottom, followed by a thick layer of partly composted stuff from my bin, then a thick layer of compost from the heap in the chickens' part of the garden (they'd raked it over so well it was almost like dust! ). I'm all for re-cycling anything and everything so very little goes to the council - even the weeds are fed back to the chooks

It all goes in my compost too - sometimes it's quite dry which can stop the process of decompostion so I have to add a bucket of water on top.

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I add it to my compost, but as Birdie Wife says, it's very dry...

I either add it with the contents of my little crock from the kitchen (peelings, tea bags, egg shells etc), or with some grass clippings, or some water, to make sure it's wet enough

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Ithink the problem was I couldn't add enough greens to compensate for the 'browns' so it died off. Is it not too potassiumy or something? Can't add my weeds from the plots to the compost because of the problem of ground-elderish roots in all our beds, so only greens are veg from the kitchen

What about grass clippings? They would be perfect.

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Dwell simply ~ love richly