home brew chicken manure tea

[simon180399]

good evening all,

I keep 16 chickens on my plot and I also have a polytunnel with a water saving system (angled guttering + wheelie bin), I had the idea of placing a spade full of fresh manure in the bottom of the bin, and allowing the water to run into the bin and create a tea type fertiliser, its been in their now for about 4 weeks and is a quarter full , its a nice shade of brown but not smelly yet, the idea is that as it matures it will get diluted as the bin fills up, we haven't used it yet but is this likely to be a winner or is it likely to be a failure, your advice and suggestions would be most welcomed, regards simon

[rustylady]

Should be OK as long as it's well diluted.

[simon180399]

Thanks for the reply, one last thing, can this be left as a permanent scheme ie leave the bin contents in there and just take what I need all year round or is their a time limit before it goes stale and becomes useless?
thank you.

[rustylady]

You will eventually use all the goodness from the manure, specially if you only have a shovelful in there, because it is constantly being diluted.

You will then have the problem of removing the sludge from the bin (yuk).

Gardeners used to advise placing the manure in a hessian sack and suspending this in a water butt. You can then simply remove the sack, empty the contents and replace with fresh.

[VirginVegGrower]

I put all the contents of the chicken housing in the compost bin along with my peelings, clippings, paper and cardboard. We get fabulous compost.

[bearded bloke]

Probably won't help but,my birds have shredded paper in the coop floor this & the poo are put into a 5 gallon bucket,after 4-6 weeks I fill the bucket with butt water & give it a stir,then stir once a day for a week,by which time by which time it will be a bit "pongy" I then pour it into a 5 gallon can through a funnel with an old plastic sieve inside.Solids from the sieve go into the dalek & I get about 4 gallons of concentrated tea,this is used at the rate of one enamel mug in a 2 gallon watering can.
Last year I used approx 14 gallons of concentrated tea.