Use What You've Got, When You've Got It

We plan on buying an electric car at some point.  That preface is necessary, because what I am about to share with you sounds like exactly the sort of nutty, hare-brained-scheme we usually run with, only this time, we're not going to, so I want to make absolutely sure everybody is on the right page before I begin.

You can run a car on chicken poop.

Just a sample:

Harold Bate, chicken farmer and inventor from Devonshire, England says that you can power your motor vehicles with droppings from chickens, pigs or any other animal of your choice... even with your own waste! To prove his statement is no idle boast, Harold has been operating a 1953 Hillman and a five-ton truck on methane gas generated by decomposing pig and chicken manure for years.

 We were looking for some kind of guidance on the science of composting with chicken waste, and we stumbled across this article on Bate's Methane Car.  Which is interesting, I suppose, but is kind of out of the line of what we were hoping to find.

See, every time we mention casually that we deep bed our chickens, and we let their poop mingle with the 2-3 feet deep leaf mixture until the compost tea matures, and we then apply that to our garden beds, we get the same nonsense response from people who think they are being helpful:  "Oh, you can't apply that directly.  It'll burn your plants!"

Yeah.

Because they've tried that very thing so often before, and that's what happened...

Sadly, however, the science of compost is very arcane, and closely held in academic circles.  For practical advice, you'll get "experts" saying useful things like "Put in a lot of organic material".  Really?  Because we had been thinking of trying to compost a bunch of 2 liter plastic coke bottles.  So you're saying leaves and stuff would work better?

The advice we were seeking had to do with:

• What types of leaves work best
• Which specific materials are best suited to adjusting pH levels up or down
• Which specific materials release which specific nutrients, and at what rate, when allowed to rot for certain amounts of time
• Which specific materials work best with each other (Is chicken poop and oak leaf a good combination?  Or should we emphasize pine needles?)

And so on.

We know from experience and from anecdotal evidence that we should use pine needles to mulch our blackberries; the moisture retention properties are just right, and the pine needles tend to acidify the soil to just about the exact level necessary.

Unfortunately, the best available advice and evidence is all anecdotal.  Until we find a good recipe book for compost for the large-scale gardener/small-scale farmer, we'll just keep using old-wives tales, and running across the occasional article about ideas even zanier than our own.

Happy farming!