its best to break it up some but not necessary. they love moldy rotten stuff. easier to break down. i just pour it on one side of the bin and mound some dirt over it. in 2-3 days it will be all gone. no meats or dairy. they can eat it but it will stink. they can survive on just shredded paper but they won’t grow or re produce. i keep some chicken crumble feed so if i have no scraps i give them that. oatmeal/ cornmeal works good too.
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Never enough… here are my compost piles. I have chips delivered from tree services, and get to haul all the manure from a local riding stable. The stable supplies the tractor there and a dump trailer!
I incorporate the two, turn the piles once a week, then spread the following year. Today was breezy and 70. Nice amounts of steam came off the fresh stuff while I turned it… nice!
If you look close, you can see my manure spreader for scale. So far, this plan has worked wonders on my deep sandy soil. (Soil type = “mineral!”) I’m looking forward to results of a new soil test in a year or so. Anecdotally, I can definitely see a difference where this has been going on for a few years!
After posting, the scale doesn’t really show up well. Those piles are 250-300 feet long.
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do you deliver? 
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I’m not proud.
I use copious amounts of urea fertilizer on a pickup truck load full of wood chips I get from the transfer station. About 1.5 yards. Got the last pile up to 150 degrees for a couple days.
No complaints of odors from the neighbors. No vermin. No weeds. No special precautions against listeria, etc. I have a surplus. Consequently, my stuff is always well-aged. Not too much shrinkage since the volume is entirely wood chips.
I expect a conventional organic pile would have a more complete nutrient profile, but then, it would be much smaller. It’s not a foregone conclusion that it is more complete, either. I’ve had it tested a couple of times. Based on the tests I spike my pile with about a dollar’s worth of real-chemical-name ferts. After all, it’s not organic the minute I threw urea on it.
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While I hear ya and understand the weed issues with manure, I can’t find a logical reason to worry about it the way I’m working things. The weeds the manure brings in will be stray seeds from fields of hay. Anything in those fields are already present at a far greater rate in my orchard and will continue to be imported by the local animal population. Ultimately, the trees will live far above the weeds and nothing will get too big, what with mowing. If I were using this in my garden where the tomatoes would get accosted, I may have a different opinion.
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When it comes to weeds, there’s nothing worse than the weeds that already seem to exist in my soil.
Any bare square inch of soil in my garden is covered in some kind of vegetation within two weeks during the growing season, if I don’t mulch it.
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I use last seasons 1/2 decomposed compost every year. I have too many sticks in the fire these days to turn my pile more than a few times a summer if even. It works really well though. Around 2nd or 3rd week of June I spread it in my vegetable garden(s). Boy does everything explode with growth about a week later! Like mentioned above, the worms work at it more too. I also usually spread a thinner layer of straw in early July, it really helps keep the heat down and conserve more moisture (Colorado air is so dry). By fall, the majority of the compost is gone.
I can’t wait to have chickens again some day to help the churning, and again all the compost from the coop bedding.
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I’ve been mulching with the coop bedding i mucked out this spring. if you don’t turn it into the soil or put it against a tree. you’re good. it will break down and fertilize over time. i remember my father putting small mounds of fresh coop bedding in between the rows of his veggies and around his apples and fruit bushes. after he harvested the garden, he would till in the bedding. by next spring the soil was ready to plant again . now that i have chickens, I’m hoping i don’t have to buy fertilizer again.
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I agree. It’s not that big a deal in an orchard setting.
I mostly use my compost for non- orchard purposes. On the trees, I use the wood chips as an uncomposted mulch. Consequently I have quack grass or something back there that lives by rhizomes. I’ll never get rid of it.
All things being equal, it’s better to kill the weed seeds, even for an orchard.
The high temp signifies a high volume of material turning to compost in the pile. When the compost temperature is like a banked campfire, that’s a lot of volume turning over.
Been busy the last few days. From where I’m beering, it doesn’t look like much of a difference, but the front left pile has shrunk a TON! I want to believe it’s an acre-inch (less the area in row with my trees) but that hope is likely the results of too many hours breathing tractor exhaust.
Tomorrow morning I’ll seed the alleyways with covercrops and hope the compost helps retain enough moisture for the buckwheat/sunflower mix to grow more than the 8-12” last year!
Also, the astute eye may notice my firewood pile appears a smidge smaller. Alas, the splitting-faries didn’t come, the grass is just growing.
Side note: one may also note the manure spreader hasn’t moved. Out of service for now! Ugh. Everything moved was done one bucket at a time.
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So… I spent the better part of four days prepping a football field sized space for next year’s planting. Spread, by my estimation, 200-250 yards of composted wood chips. At 700 lbs per yard and 30% moisture, this comes in at somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 tons of organic matter on a little over an acre. (This was done using a 1/3 yard bucket. I need a bigger bucket!!!)
To stir up some controversy, I plowed it under! Gasp! I know this will bind up nitrogen in the immediate vicinity of each chip (I think I read within a centimeter) for awhile, it should be worth it. My soil type registers as ‘mineral’ with seemingly negligible organic matter. It would take many many years of cover cropping to achieve this spike in organic matter.
I did run a test on incorporating woodchips last year. The spot where I did this showed the best cover crop growth I’ve seen and this year’s planting of elderberries seem to be doing well.
Time will tell!
As an aside, if anyone wants to buy a small manure spreader in northern Michigan…
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This is the one thing that’s kept me from trying hot composting: seems like a lot of work for a little bit of “black gold.” To be honest, I’m sort of lazy—so I usually get organic matter by appropriately lazy cold-composting methods. I find that well-rotted wood chips are a great mulch and soil builder. Whenever tree trimmers are working nearby, I try to snag a load, which I leave to mellow for a year or two before using. I also save all fall leaves and let them break down over the winter and early spring. They not only serve as a great garden and orchard mulch, but they also continue to compost after application and so build soil over time; they also seem to feed the plants they’re applied to that season—perhaps something to do with the release of humic acid and other substances. Sweet taters absolutely love a thick mulching with rotted leaves!
And though it’s not exactly compost, one rotting thing I’m a firm believer in is comfrey tea. Melons especially seem to respond well to a good drench or two with it. Bonus: it’s dirt cheap, unlike most of the commercial organic liquid fertilizer products. (And your neighbors will looooove its signature bouquet! 
)
Edit: Of course, cover cropping/green manuring is another way to simplify composting/soil building!
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i also make comfrey tea and chop and drop my comfrey around my trees and bushes. its also great to get a new compost pile to break down quicker. bought a small hand scythe to make the job quicker. i let it grow until the flowers turn dull, then i chop. get 2 harvests this way and the bees get a chance to get the nectar.
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Another believer in comfrey tea! I also use a variety of other dynamic accumulator type plants in these anaerobic brews…
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me too! i have borage , dandelion and nettle i throw in there also. just not as much as comfrey. i find a little blackstrap molasses helps the process along and ands trace minerals.
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We have mountains of wood chips we use for lots of purposes including as bedding in the barn in inclimate weather…not as soft as straw, but dry and much better then cold wet muck. When we clean the barn we pile it, and the added urine and manure hastens the breakdown.
Hubby would like to do more with worms, but we have huge numbers of them in the piles naturally, and the smart chickens harvest them in winter months.
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We have a large pile of manure from the neighbors steer by the big garden which we turn with the loader. Closer to the house I have a smaller compost pile where the kitchen scraps and pulled weeds from the kitchen garden and ornamental beds go. I built a sifter for the smaller pile that fits inside our garden cart. I shovel the compost onto the screen (1/2" hardware cloth) and slide the sifter back and forth and then dump the debris that won’t sift through. Works well and gives me a nice compost to spread. I built it out of 2"x6". The only change I may make is to make it deeper as some compost falls over the top edge as I shake it back and forth.
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If you are looking for wood chips you could always try a website like chipdrop. It is basically a service where you put your name in and you get on a list that local arborists can access and it gives them permission to dump all kinds of wood chips at your location. Check it out. I have no affiliation with them. However I have put my name on the list to try to get a load of free wood chips delivered, but apparently I am too far out of the zone of most of the tree companies that want to dump free wood chips. I do have a local Tree Service about 2 mi away from my house, but they charge about $70 for I think it is about 9 yards of wood chips. I have bought from them in the past, but they are a pain in the butt to work with since wood chips is not their main business, my requests don’t normally get answered in a timely manner. Oh well you can’t win them all.
Oh, and I do also have a municipal compost site that sells compost. They collect all the leaves and debris from around town and compost it and then sell it back to the local community. The price of the compost is rather inexpensive, however to have them deliver to my address cost about $65 per trip and their trucks Can Only Hold about 6 yards. So it cost me about $130 to get 6 yards of compost. Of course if I wanted to go and get it myself with my pickup truck, it would be cheaper, but it would take a heck of a lot longer.
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