How I Make HEAPS of Compost in My Backyard (Feat. Chickens)

The reality of producing enough organic vegetables to feed Maddy and I is that I need to produce a lot of compost. A lot. 10 cubic meters a year which is like 30 of these. I'm a full-time architect so there's only so many hours in the week that I can dedicate to making compost. It's taken me a lot of trial and error to come up with a backyard composting system that's high yield, high quality, low effort and zero cost. So in this episode I'll be walking you through my composting system and the six key elements to consider if you're looking to scale up your own compost production. Watch to the end because I'm going to share the one piece of equipment that has been a game changer for my compost. So this is my property. You can see my house and garage, some compost bays in the driveway, the greenhouse but most importantly the compost area which also doubles as our chicken run. I've located the area here because it's a shady area covered by fruit trees. It's close to the garden and it's not visible from our house. I'm going to explain all of this in more detail but at a higher level this is how my system works. All the material gets dumped into this section to begin the composting process and then once it's filled up I'll move it all down into the next section to make room for more material. This process continues and the compost makes its way down the hill until it gets to the other end of the compost area by which time it's fully broken down and ready to go out into the garden. So what materials do I use? Well much of what I compost comes from the garden and from the kitchen scraps but those alone are not sufficient to create the amount of compost that my garden needs. So in order to scale up my system I've found two waste streams that I can reliably tap into for free. First one is woody mulch from my local tip which is a great high carbon material and the other one is coffee grounds a great high nitrogen material that a local company collects from cafes all around Melbourne and delivers to gardeners for free. I built some bays out of pallets in my driveway so that I can easily store large amounts of these materials. So for you think about what waste streams you might be able to tap into whether it's autumn leaves or whether it's wood chips or sawdust or even animal manures. Chickens are not an essential part of compost making but they are an important part of my system because they save me a lot of time and money and they improve the quality of my compost. As soon as I bring any new material into the compost area they start scratching and spreading and mix it all around and that's really good for three reasons. First they're getting the process of decomposition started straight away by increasing the surface area of the material. Second as they scratch they also poop adding their nitrogen rich manure to the pile. And the third reason is subtle but important as they scratch they also spread the material out and what that does is it allows all the material to get evenly wet when it rains. Moisture is so important in a compost pile but getting all your materials soaked through can be time consuming which I used to do on a wheelbarrow but by making compost in the rainy season I can skip this step which saves me a lot of time. Speaking of the rainy season this video has been bloody challenging to make because of the weather. They're getting the This is so unpleasant. The third reason is subtle but important. So wet! We will make this video at all costs. So if you're enjoying this video so far I'd love it if you gave it a like and subscribed it would really help my channel. Okay back to the video. So this is a bunch of material that I've been building up over the past few weeks and in it there's grass clippings, there's woody mulch, there's coffee grounds, there's kitchen scraps and here I've got their manure from their coop that I'm going to spread on it as well. And I could leave it all spread out and it would break down over time but what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to build it up into a big pile and that's going to allow me to introduce the next element in my system which is heat. So let me tell you about how hot composting When you assemble all the material into a pile what you're doing is you're reducing the surface area of the material that's exposed to the outside air and then as the microbes are feeding on it their heat will actually cause the pile to get hotter if the pile is big enough. As the pile gets hotter it becomes more hospitable for the microbes and their population increases and so the pile gets hotter again. And if you've got the balance of materials right this process should top This seems to be the agreed optimal range for maximising decomposition whilst minimising the amount of nutrients that you lose to off-gassing and it's also the temperature range at which you can kill weed seeds and plant pathogens. So here's my finished pile it only took me about 15 minutes to make this and that was greatly assisted by the fact that the material was already nice and wet by rain that we had last night. So now that it's done I'm going to cover it with a tarp and leave it to heat up and decompose and the tarp also locks the moisture in it stops it from getting too wet and it keeps the chickens off. To turn or not to turn is a question I've asked myself many times during my years of making compost. On the one end of the spectrum you have the lazy gardener's approach where you just pile it all up and let it break down and wait somewhere between six months to a year and on the other end of the spectrum you've got the high effort 18-day compost where you're turning the compost every day or every two days. I've tried both and I think both can work but for my system I've landed closer to the lazy gardener's approach and here's why. I use woody mulch which takes a long time to break down and requires fungal activity and fungi do not like to be disturbed but if I don't turn the pile at all then the material on the outside won't break down at the same speed as the material on the inside. For me what works best is to turn my pile twice because it's a balance between not disturbing the fungi too much but also allowing the material to break down evenly. I try to wait one to two months between turns and I usually find that it takes four to six months to have finished compost. This pile here is about a month old so I'm going to cover it with a tarp and then I'm going to leave it for another one to two months before I turn it again. So this is a finished pile of compost it's about six months old and it's ready to go out into the garden but what I'm going to do before I distribute it is I'm going to sift it. So I'm about to show you the fastest way to sift compost and I can sift about a cubic meter of compost in but let me know if you think you can sift faster. This method has saved me so much time and money because without it I wouldn't be able to make all my own seed raising mix and I've seen a lot of different contraptions out there but I think all you really need is a simple elegant A-frame sifter. It's just two timber frames which in this case I actually just found on the side of the road with a bit of steel welded mesh over the top that's it and the key to getting this to work is to make sure that your compost is dry enough. If it's too wet then this won't work well at all. This is where the chickens come in handy again because if my compost is too wet I can get the chickens to scratch through it they'll break up clumps they'll spread it out and they'll help dry it out and the other thing they do at this stage is they pick out any worms that might be in the compost. If I'm sifting compost for my seed raising mix I've got this extra frame here which I can put on top which has a finer mesh and you can see that what I'm left with is a finely sifted compost. So once the compost is sifted it comes back out into the garden to complete the nutrient cycle feeding the soil and in turn helping our plants thrive. A lot of it will be spread on garden beds and the rest of it will go into the greenhouse to start seedlings. So here's a summary of the most important elements that have allowed me to scale up my composting system. One, I set up my compost area close to where I garden and combined it with my chicken run. Two, I source materials from local waste streams. Three, I use chickens for their manure and their tireless work ethic. Four, I use heat to break down the piles faster. Five, I turn in frequently and let time do the work. And six, I use an A-frame for speedy sifting. If you've got any questions or want to know more about my composting system then let me know in the comments. Thanks for watching and don't forget to subscribe.