(upbeat music) >>I have chickens and they produce two wonderful byproducts.

First of all, is their eggs, 'cause I enjoy eating eggs.

And their manure.

This manure is so rich, it adds so many great benefits back to the soil.

First of all, if you're working with manure, you wanna avoid E. coli, salmonella.

So use your gloves, make sure that you protect yourself from the raw manure if you're choosing to use it.

So I have three different stages of manure here.

This is my raw manure, which was just harvested.

You see the white in there?

That means that it has a high ammonia and urine content to it.

If I spread this around and I have plants here, it can burn my plants because it's high in ammonia, high in nitrogen.

The best thing to do is to compost it three months to a year.

It heats up to approximately 130 to 140 degrees for several days, and it'll kill the pathogens that's in your manure.

I have some manure here, also with some organic matter.

This is about three months old, I can mix this into my soil.

It is nice and tight, but one thing that I also wanna make sure that I do is water this in really good, because this has to break down.

I like to keep it in a separate black container, which has drainage holes, allow rainwater to wash away a lot of the ammonia that collects in here, and also the salt levels.

But I prefer to have more aged manure when I wanna put my veggies and plants in it.

I will take this manure, which is a over a year old, and it looks like mud, I will take this, mix it really well into my soil, and then once I do that, I'll take my planter containers and I'll fill it up with soil, and then I can plant directly into this container.

Now, when you're adding this manure to your soil, think about it, this is a recyclable, sustainable resource.

It builds your soil.

So if you know someone who has chickens, if you have chickens, add your chicken manure back into your soil.

Make sure that you compost it, give it that nice time that it needs, because all the other veggies and scraps that you're putting in your compost bin becomes that complete nutrient rich soil that your plants need to grow.

Try it, happy gardening.

(chicken clucking)