Organic cannabis growers love chicken manure for their crops. This nutrient-packed compost provides cannabis plants with a slow release of a large part of the nutrition needed to grow heavy, beautiful buds.
Chicken manure is incredibly popular with growers, especially those who have their own chickens. Aside from the smell, chicken manure is rich in a lot of nutrients and is used in a lot of plant gardens, from flowers to vegetables. A lot of new growers ask if chicken manure is good for cannabis plants and if they should use it.
Chicken manure is an excellent fertilizer for cannabis plants. While you shouldn’t use it as a growing medium, chicken manure is full of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium which makes it an excellent candidate as a slow-release nutritious formula for your cannabis.
Using chicken manure as fertilizer does take some preparation and you really shouldn’t just toss chicken feces onto your cannabis plant as this can burn it. Let’s dive into a little about why chicken manure is a great choice for your plants.
What Exactly Is Chicken Manure?
Chicken manure is exactly what it sounds like, it’s the product of chicken excrement. You can turn chicken manure into compost which is what you want to add to your cannabis plants as a supplement during the growing cycle. You can purchase it from your local garden center as compost or dried to add to your own mixture.
Since manure can be extremely hot, it’s best to compost it for at least 6 months. This means letting it sit in some soil and break down a little, before adding it to your plants. If you were to add the manure as is, you will more than likely have some nutrient burn paying a visit to your plants.
Obviously, if you own chickens then you’ll have a consistent supply of fresh manure that you can have year-round and it’ll require a bit more work than if you were just to buy it from a store.
How To Make Your Own Chicken Compost
Creating your own compost mix using chicken manure is easy to do, you just have to plan ahead as it takes time to do so.
An ideal mix would be ¼ chicken manure to whatever mix you do with. The rest of it can consist of a mixture of forest humus and promix soil.
The important thing is to let it sit for several months, and even up to a year. This allows the microbes to break down the hot nutrients into something that is more accessible for your plant to absorb.
Final Thoughts
Chicken manure is an excellent way to feed your cannabis plants the macronutrients they need to develop into strong plants. If you want to create your own compost be sure to make it in advance so that it’s ready for your cannabis.
If you have your own chickens it’s even better as you can prepare the next season’s compost in advance and keep a steady supply of compost for your plants.
Additionally, if you don’t have your own chickens you can easily buy chicken compost from your local garden center which takes a lot of the guesswork out of creating your own.
Find out more about what is the best soil for growing cannabis, what is the living soil, and much more on our website!
