Bedding
What To Do With It
Bedding from the barns or sheep sheds is very, very useful! As the raised garden bed shows below, it can be used to provide mulch for this year's fallow ground, and makes a wonderful soil for the next year's crops, literally teeming with organic matter, earth worms and good things for the soil structure.
We clean out our barns and sheds twice a year, in the spring and fall. Holes and uneven areas of pastures are filled in, new raised garden beds are filled, and old raised beds are topped off. Extra bedding is applied thickly and evenly over the poorest pastures.
This is a job that is easy to do with a pitchfork and a garden cart. If you feel the need for a small tractor with a bucket, that's ok, too. It will make the job go more quickly, but you will lose out on much of the physical workout, which is something that I find meditative and rewarding. Who needs a gym or an aerobics class? Shoveling out a barn leaves you with the same physical results, but you actually have something to show for it after the workout is over!
Bedding should be applied very thickly and evenly over gardens and pastures, as it will break down considerably within the next year. In our area hay is cheaper than straw, so our bedding will self sow in the pasture due to the hay seeds left in it.
See our Pigs At Work page, which shows how livestock can be utilized for rototilling and composting barn bedding for use on pastures. We have found that following this rotation with chickens will fine tune any uneven areas.
The 4' x 16' raised garden bed below is an example of barn bedding put to good use by layering it with the clay found on our farm. The soil in our garden beds is now friable and full of earthworms. Some of the sheep responsible for this good soil are shown here.
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