I like your chicken tractor. Congratulations on making it yourself! Here's what I learned while having chickens: Keep rain off the manure, otherwise the manure washes away. Manure tea: 1. fill a bucket half full w/fresh manure. 2. Bring bucket to where you're going to use the tea, and fill w/water. 3. Let it sit for a few days. Stir now and then. (No bedding included w/the tea.) Let manure settle on the bottom before scooping out the tea. 4. Add more water as the tea gets used. It smells a bit, but I thought it was a good smell. I would scoop some of the tea and very carefully add it to the soil around the tomatoes while they were young plants and needed nitrogen to get big and bushy prior to setting fruit. That year we had the best tomatoes, and they matured and yielded exceptionally well. I would never add manure tea to greens that don't get cooked, such as lettuce. Also, children should not come into contact with the stuff, or any manure for that matter. Fresh eggs sometimes have poop on them, and I'd not let children handle the eggs. But that's me... Others may disagree. Good luck w/your garden and your chickens. Here is a link that might be useful: 'Backyard Chickens' forum

Thanks jonas. Actually I was hoping to use it immediately in my containers till I read all the cautions about pathogens and not using even aged manure if the soil was going to be used in 3 months (or something like that). It doesn't smell that much though i have a really bad cold right now, so it's hard to say! I put a bunch in my compost bin yesterday. Checked my bin today it still seems the same cool temperature but my bin is normally cool so that doesn't tell me much. I definitely don't feel ok about putting my hand in it! And I would say it's definitely not gooey - some of the 'apples' are green a few are grayish.

All of the Ag schools today will tell you that animal manures should be aged for 12 months before being used in your garden and then the manure should be applied 90 to 120 days before harvest. However, properly composted manures (mixed with about 3 parts vegetative waste to 1 part manure) can be applied sooner. Never, ever simply allow animal manures to sit since that allows many valuable nutrients to escape into the atmosphere or into the ground water below the pile.

We have chickens for the first time too, so we've wondered the same thing. Our bedding is fresh sawdust/wood chips/shavings, which in our climate bind up nitrogen in the soil for a long time. So we're putting the poop/bedding mixture in the leaf bin, to help speed up the leaf breakdown, and will throw some on the ground around shrubs once the soil is frozen. If it were poop alone, or mixed with a less stubborn carbon source like straw, I'd use melonhedd's idea - covered with mulch and given a couple of months for the soil organisms to work it, it should make a great fertilizer.