So we’ve been making a pile of chicken feathers for about two years.
Yah, out of context it does sound kinda weird.
You see, Feather meal is a rather expensive, but very good organic fertilizer. It’s like 12-0-0 or something like that (to lazy to Google it, that’s your job now). My friend Luther uses it with seedling mixes for an epic seed starting mixture.
I don’t know of a source for it anymore. Getting it in those tiny bags at garden centers wouldn’t be cost effective for my large-ish garden. There was a plant in Mississippi, not very far from me, that was producing it as well as chicken manure pellets and selling in 50 pound bags, but they shut down. (Sad!)
We pluck a decent amount of feathers in our pastured poultry business. I don’t like to put them in the compost pile, because they take forever to decompose, and if you dont spread them veeery thinly, they clump up and get nasty. Also, being so high in nitrogen I’m afraid I’ll throw off the C:N ratio.
So, instead of mixing the feathers with the compost, we made a pile next to it, just for chicken feathers. Not covered, but I think I will cover it in the future, and turn it occasionally, to reduce it’s annoying tendency to mat together. We kept adding and adding to it, and now, two years later, we have a somewhat respectably sized pile. I raked the top feathers off yesterday, and after several inches of very un-decomposed white feathers, I hit gold:
I didn’t realise that the N was so high. I just chuck them in the compost, but then for us its only 5-10 birds/year, so they seems to mix in and break down ok. I had know idea that people would BUY them!
Don’t these smell when you put them on the garden? Or maybe the composting action does the job there.
Bruce
No, they were composted enough they they do not have a very noticeable odor unless you stick your nose in it. Besides, I will be disking them in the ground,
This post will now give my father a reason to get chickens again! I don’t think he’s ever used feathers in his compost piles.