The first way I discovered to build soil is harnessing the amazing power of…
Chickens.
These crazy clucking machines are perfect for creating soil. Here’s my strategy, which I got from Harvey Ussery in his book, The Small Scale Poulty Flock.
Our 25 chickens free range around the farm during the day, but at night they gather in a coop. We cover the dirt floor with pine needles. Since we have acres of pine timber on the land, this is easy and free. The chickens eat our table scraps, some grain, and plenty of plants and bugs. Their manure is high in nitrogen, so it needs a high carbon material to create good compost and soil. So we add the high carbon pine needles to balance the ratio.
And there’s no need to turn the bedding, because when we throw some grain or scraps into the coop, the chicken will scratch around and turn it themselves.
Once or twice a year, when the bedding is pretty well broken down, we’ll empty the bedding and move it to our garden area. We leave a bit of bedding in the coop, because we don’t want to strip all the beneficial bacteria away that live there. That way they can continue to multiple and make our chickens healthy and robust.
This is such a brief introduction, but if your interest in piqued, check out more by Googling “Harvey Ussery.”
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