I'm not sure. You might be better off composting the poopy bedding so you can tell when it is done heating up and you are less likely to loose nitrogen to leaching that way. I'm not sure what the perscribed length of time is for different manures but a year seems safe.

Perhaps if you don't want to build a compost heap, perhaps you can do kinda a lasagna bed with the coop scoopings in the mix. If you build it in the fall and it gets hot for a while, it might be safe to plant in the next season. I'm not an expert on this though.

tclynx: My lasagna doesn't get hot, and I don't believe that most do. It's a function of depth- too shallow to make enough heat. It just cold composts. But then, I don't use poop. I do use a lot of grass clippings, though, and they never heat. My lasagna is never deep enough for that.

Karen

I've always had good results spreading the chickenspit on top of my beds, watering it well, then covering with a pretty thick layer of mulch. I let the beds sit at least two months before planting, long enough that I can't find any traces of the poop... The "experts" will probably give you much more detailed info and warnings to compost first.

Hmmm, maybe I will have to do some experimenting then!

I did a little more reading today and I think that many "experts" will say 6 months of aging is enough. I would probably still spread it and cover with a little extra carbon material so that the nitrogen has something to bind with instead of being leached away.

No manure should ever be just spread on top of soil. The single best thing to do with any manure is compodt it, but if that manure must be spread on the garden it should be tilled in as quickly as possible because that distinctive odor of manure spread on fields is nutrient, primarily Nitrogen, loss.
How quickly after spreading manure on a garden plot you can plant will depend a great deal on how much other organic matter is in that soil, but usually 6 to 8 weeks is what has been suggested for years.

Thanks! I do have a compost pile right by the coop, so when it is time to clean old bedding I will just dump it there and let it compost with the rest. I have never had access to chicken poo before.

I think it is a bit too late for me to be tilling anything in, we already had out first snow!

L

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.

I'm looking into buying a house out of town, so I can have chickens and stuff. One of the things I have read about is that some people will build special pens to go over their gardens and let their chickens sit there during the day or just let the area be caged pen for the winter. They add a mulch, like leaves, then let the chickens in. The chickens help shred the mulch and look for all kinds of pest hiding in the garden. Their poop I would just think compost down with the leaves over the winter.

I should sell the clay in my garden to potters. I dug down a foot and piled a mixture of chicken poo and old hay then covered it with the clay. I'm seriously hoping that in a few years of repeating this process I might have a decent garden. Is there anything else I can do to change my clay into garden gold? Other then paying an arm and a leg for several pallets of miracle grow dirt? Would dumping sand into it work? How do you break up clay? Any help and you rock!