Chicken manure would still be too hot to add directly to soil. You can compost it, though, and it’ll make an excellent addition to your soil. You can often compost your bedding along with the manure, aim for about 75% bedding with 25% manure (roughly) for best results. (Assuming you use straw or wood shavings for bedding, of course.) It’ll only need about 4-6 weeks to compost down that way!

Thanks for the kind comment! We do re-use our potting soil from year to year, some of it for more than six years now. We do observe significant depletion of nutrition in subsequent years. We correct this by adding additional compost and by using fertilizer to re-enhance the soil. This topic is actually on-deck for a post here this winter as we feel it’s important to cover for a sustainable container garden!

I can appreciate that! One cubic yard is exactly 27 cubic feet. Put another way, you basically need (40) 5 gallon buckets full of material total to compose one cubic yard. The exact ratios would depend on your desired materials, as mentioned in the post. It can be a little challenging to figure out, but remember, it’s not a perfect science and there’s a lot of flexibility.

Figured I’d respond separately. We buy most of our stuff from Risse’s Greenhouse. Compost has been a challenge lately, though, since the Golden Heart Utilities shut down their production in 2019. (We’ve had to seriously beef up our compost production heavily to deal with it.) You can often find bags of compost (typically steer manure) at Home Depot and Lowes early in the season. Another source is finding local animal farmers, they often are looking for people to take their manure. You still have to compost it a bit before using it, as it’s typically too “hot” coming straight from the farm.

For seed mix, we often have only found that at Holm Town. In a lot of cases, a good soil (such as ProMix) can actually be used for seed starting, but you will often get moss growing since it’s not sterile. We typically go from seeding tray (with seed mix) to transplant pot (regular potting soil) fairly quickly. There are very few plants that are highly sensitive to transplants (spinach & corn come to mind), but even these will transplant with fairly high success.

Thanks for the kind comment! In years past, you could get inexpensive peat moss from the soil seller behind Brown Jug. I heard there were some difficulties with that seller starting last year, but don’t have personal experience. Lately, we’ve needed less peat moss, so we’ve purchased large bricks at either Home Depot or Risse’s Greenhouse. Great Northwest may also be able to source peat moss, but I haven’t checked. (BTW, their garden mix is probably the best in town, but note what we say about “garden soil” in this post…it has decent amounts of peat moss in it, but still can use further amendment to make it great.)

And we probably have met. We’re over in F2 & F3. I think I know who you are. 🙂

thanks!