Storing autumn leaves
I'm starting to get more
sophisticated about my biomass uses. While autumn leaves make a
good mulch for perennials, they tend to blow around, so when I have my
druthers, I've been using seedless
weeds and composted
wood chips there.
Meanwhile, I'd like to
channel the autumn leaves into the chicken coops, where they make the
best possible addition to the deep
bedding. The
leaves are high enough in carbon that they counteract quite a lot of
manure, and they're also fluffy enough that chickens can scratch
through easily, mixing the coop-floor compost heap.
The snag I'm hitting in
my grand plan is storage. While I
can rake leaves out of the woods at any time of the year, right now is when they're
easy pickings. Before they've been run over and rained on too
many times, it's child's play to rake the leaves off the bare parts of
the driveway, then scoop them into the golf cart. In half an
hour, I can come home with three heaping wheelbarrowsful.
But where to put
them? For deep bedding, it's best to store leaves somewhere dry,
and they're so fluffy that they take up a lot of space. I'm
starting out the easy way by filling both coops to the brim --- I may
have to fork through the leaves if the tops get matted down, but
otherwise I'll have happy chickens for at least a month or two with
little work. I'd like to store enough to last me all year,
though, since deep bedding starts to smell and breed flies in the
summer if not refreshed frequently, and I'm slow to add more bedding if
all I have on hand is subpar materials. I'm pondering closing in
a little corncrib-like room in the barn and stuffing it full of leaves,
but I feel like there's a simpler solution out there. Ideas?
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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Daddy --- Good cheap and easy idea!
Rein --- Interesting idea to top the pile with compost and dirt instead of plastic. Does that still keep them dry, or are you composting the leaves for garden application?
Heather --- We rented a chipper once, but decided the juice wasn't worth the squeeze. It was a hassle to get the chipper to our farm, and then even that industrial version chipped so very slowly....
Instead, I've been piling up limbs like that in brush piles around my fruit trees, mashing them down a bit now and then and adding weeds on top. The method seems to be working well! Since I made that post, my weed piles seem to have taken care of greenery trying to push up through the brush pile.
The other alternative is to flag down the folks who chip trees along the road and powerline. They'll often dump off a whole dump-truckload if you've got an accessible open spot. You'll want to let the chips age for at least a year (two is better) before using, but they're high quality and free!
I've no extra storage space myself. it either goes on or in the ground. I,erm, repurpose my neighbors bags of leaves.
Dump into a trash can, use weed whipper like a stick blender, dump out can where needed. Repeat. Very quick breakdown, no blowing all over the place etc. etc. I have to do a few sections of one bag from the neighbors trees, but for my tiny spot it is worth it.
Well chickens dont really "pee", but the chicken pooh does contain their nitrogenous waste- its the white part of the poop. Mammals convert nitrogen to urea, but since chickens, and all birds, don't have a bladder, it ges changed to uric acid, and excreted along with their other solid waste.
There are very few leaves here- the only deciduous tree being aspen . I went out in the forest yesterday and raked up two big bags of it for bedding for the hens. I need more. I wonder what the forest rangers would say if they saw me raking the woods! Leaves are much nicer than pine needles!
Deb --- Yep, you definitely get the high nitrogen component in chicken manure, but the lack of actual liquid urine makes the droppings very dry. I think your aspen leaves will be top-notch bedding --- a log like maple, which is my favorite.
Mark and I were just talking over dinner about how hard it would be to live in an area without lots of trees. I use their biomass for so many things --- potting soil, hugelkultur amendments, mulch, wood stove food, etc. I'm glad you found a few leaves.