Kitchen Garden Forum

Hi folks. No doubt this has been asked before in some form or another, but I need to ask anyway My raised beds are 8ft x 4ft, so, can someone please tell me roughly how much chicken manure I would need to add to my beds at this time of year ? The reason I would like to add this is because I believe my soil is quite alkaline and as I understand it, C/M is very acidic. It is likely that the C/M would be quite fresh, but I reckon if applied now, it should be ok come springtime. All feedback gratefully accepted.

Cheers...Freddy.

Hi Freddy, I keep chickens and ducks and autumn is when i apply it to my raised beds, spreading their soiled strawy bedding on empty beds, the winter rains wash it into the soil and dilute it leaving a clean straw mulch that I can plant through, in summer I add their soiled straw bedding to the compost heap, and it goes on the beds as compost after the heat is out of it, fresh from chicken its very hot and will burn plants. If you are using chicken pellets then it usually gives a guide to quantities on the container. I found some quantity guidance on this link

http://poultryone.com/articles/chickenmanure.html

Hiya N/B, thanks for the reply. As I said, I would be using fresh C/M (with bedding), but I'd still like to know how much to spread over the bed. Are we talking a layer of around 1 - 2 inches ?

Cheers...Freddy.

I use about 3-4 inches chicken or duck straw bedding, worms take it down gradually by spring that still leaves a mulch to conserve moisture and deter weeds, any weeds that do grow through pull out easily, but within about a year the worms have had most of the mulch and incorporated it..

Hiya N/B. Thanks for the reply, should be interesting to see the reaction of my veggies next year.

Cheers...Freddy.