Team Work.

Never do a job yourself that you can get the chickens to do. I wanted to turn my oldest compost pile to really get things decomposing again. The pile was frozen around the edges and steaming hot in the middle. It is about a year old and I covered it with lots of leaves and seaweed in the fall. I'm hoping to be able to use it to side dress my crops in early summer.

If you have ever witnessed the destructive nature of a chicken, you'd know that their speciality is scratching through soil, and other matter, turning it over and over. They use their feet to scratch through the soil, eating any bugs they uncover in the process. Soil, and other matter, goes flying through the air, being spread several feet from where they initially started scratching. This is why chicken can be used to aerate soil and lawn, turn compost and soil and basically till a garden space. The chickens love having a job to do. If they do not have a project to work at, you can find them completely destroying my flower beds. They've ripped up perennials and bulbs on several occasions. That's why we normally contain them in the chicken tractor.  I just start turning the compost myself and after several shovelfuls the girls take over. An easy way to turn compost is to simply take it all out of the pile and put it back in, turning it a few times in the process. The girls will shortly have the majority of the compost pulled out, scratch through and broken down into smaller pieces. After that, all I need to do is shovel it back in. Easy peasy. 

Getting right in there. 

Hey there. 

Lots of bugs to eat. 

Scratching away. 

Pallets are quite trendy and make a great frame for a compost pile. It's a good idea to allow air to flow all around the compost, the pallets allow this. Ours are broken in spots since we live in bear country and in early spring when food is short, we may have a bear try and take the compost apart.