Preparing The Brassica Cage, Chicken Fertiliser

Last Sunday was one of those rare, truly beautiful winter’s days. The sun was shining from a blue sky and the afternoon was quite warm feeling. A day to be wrapped up warm on the plot.

The chicken manure rotted woodchips and soil piled up.

The chickens are in their winter avian flu lockdown. They’ve plenty of room, 1.8 square metres per hen, so they’re happy enough but free ranging is out. Left to itself the secure run would get pretty mucky so I regularly put down wood chips. A bit like a deep litter system.

They enjoy scratching about in the chippings, which effectively mixes their nitrogen rich droppings in to the carbon rich wood so it decomposes quite quickly. It does build up though, so scraped up the compost and soil and piled it in the veg plot. You really can’t have too much compost!

Sheep Manure

My neighbour gave me a load of sheep muck when he cleaned out his lambing sheds about 18 months ago. I covered this with a tarpaulin so the rain wouldn’t wash out the nutrients and left it be.

I had thought about moving it into a tall heap to rot down but didn’t get around to it. Glad I didn’t as that would have been a lot of unnecessary work. What’s left now is completely rotted down and appears to be just a dark black soil. No sign of straw at all. It’s not recognizable as manure at all.

The only negative is that there bits of slate and bailer twine throughout. Getting the twine out is easy but the slate is just rock so not a bother.

Brassica Cage

Limed rotted sheep manure in the brassica cage

In a perfect world I would have moved the brassica cage as part of the crop rotation but it really requires 4 people to do it. So took up the weed matting up in the brassica cage and trundled barrow loads of the rotted manure in. I’ve added a couple of inches depth over the area. Rather than move it to new soil, I’ve brought the new soil to it.

Now brassicas really like a neutral soil so I scattered a good trowel full of lime per square yard to raise the pH. I wouldn’t add lime to fresh manure but this is basically rich soil. Then began re-laying the weed matting but time caught up.

The next job is to make the cage rabbit proof. Well at least make it difficult for the pretty little devils.