Cleaning out deep litter

I’ve been tossing new bags of
leaves in the chicken coop every week or two to refresh
the deep bedding,
and the chickens kept scratching and matting those leaves down into a
thick, warm layer.  However, the bedding finally got so high that
if I added any more, the chickens wouldn’t have been able to come in
their pop hole.  Time to harvest a bit of the leaf and manure
mixture to go on the compost pile!



Since deep
bedding’s benefits increase the older it gets, I didn’t want to harvest
everything or I would have been back at ground zero.  So I just
used a pitchfork to remove the top four inches, adding fresh leaves to
cover up what was left behind.



The wheelbarrow full of
litter didn’t look decomposed enough to put on the garden, so I wheeled
it to an out of the way spot to finish decomposing.  I’ll let you
know how it looks at the end of the summer, at which point I hope to
have some of the world’s best compost.