Despite industrial agriculture’s co-opting and subsequent diminishing of the descriptor “free range”, it is rewarding to be able to describe our chickens as such and mean it.  They aren’t limited to a euphemistic “access to the outdoors” — typically a meager chicken run meeting the minimum USDA standard and meant to dupe consumers.  Our pullets can roam where they choose in our yard, eat what they like, and defend themselves (or not) as needed from the wild animals that share their space.

They can be chickens, every day.

So far, they use their new-found liberty to scratch and peck from morning to evening in an unrelenting march about the yard.  They are particularly fond of the compost piles, perhaps having longed for these stacks of edible refuse that sat just out of reach for as long as they can remember.  They spend half their time there, as I’d hoped, fertilizing and turning the piles in exchange for the bugs and scraps they get to eat.

Bailey (Rhode Island Red), Seven (Barred Rock), and Justin (Buff Orpington) cruise together, with Kate (Dominique) almost always on her own.  It’s not clear by whose design this is, but I find it hard to believe either party would exclude the other as a result of Kate being added to the flock a week after the others.  She is also one week younger.  But the disconnect is hard to disregard.  At least they get along like acquaintances, if not sisters.

In exploring the yard, they’ll peck anything once: grass, sandal, flower, cement.  They don’t seem opposed to eating the spiny, mature growth on our squash plants, unfortunately, so they’ll have to be kept away from most of the vegetables, even if they do ultimately turn havoc in the garden into eggs.  Their powerful scratching — the yard at the end of the first day of ranging looked like it had been hit by a hundred tiny tornadoes — also poses a problem for delicate or shallow-rooted plants, as many edibles are.

However, we could hardly confine them any longer.  Though our coop is sized with the requisite four square feet of floor space and 10 inches of roost per bird, we would have built it bigger if our intent was to always keep them in.  As it was clear when they needed to move from the brooder to the coop at six weeks, it was clear they needed to range at 20.  They’re big, and they look bigger, more real for some reason as they trot, scratch, and peck across our view out the back door, and add their clucks to our morning breakfast — providing a novel, yet natural backdrop to our every day.

I had nothing to do with the most brilliantly green, healthy, sturdy potatoes growing in my yard.  These half dozen tall shoots found their own way, and have been managed expertly by a decomposing pile of food and yard waste.  I feel slighted, but thankful.

By comparison, the potato plants for which I chose locations, amended the soil, and then set into the earth at precise depths with their eyes pointed skyward are a mere 10-inches tall to the pile’s 17.  In some cases mine display leaves with yellow and pale-green striations (iron deficiency, likely) or burgundy freckles (some disease or fungus) or that are tough and leathery (probably a nutrient deficiency), and at least one has the droopy, sallow look of death.

The compost potatoes, on the other hand, arose from scraps tossed carelessly into the pile, were on occasion disturbed by turning, and received irregular watering.  And during most of their growth they were situated in little to no soil and instead sat beneath several inches of leaves and clippings — which I have discovered is an accepted method of growing potatoes called “no dig.”

A friend of ours, Amy, has the same compost-sprouting happening in her bin, and asked whether it would be safe to eat potatoes grown in such a way.  It’s a fair question.  Until that pile turns to beautiful earth, it’s really like growing food in trash.  However, if you treat the resulting potatoes with the same scrutiny you give any vegetable, whether it’s from your garden or the market, such potatoes should be perfectly edible.  Since mine weren’t uniformly covered by soil, mulch, or straw, I’ll need to check each potato for green areas that occur when the developing spud receives direct sunlight.  This exposure can produce a toxin in the potato that can make the eater sick.

Otherwise, compost potatoes should be as good as any.  Or better than some.

Last week I harvested my first lot of ready compost from the pile with the potatoes, leaving the section with the tubers intact.  For the past six months I have been more than skeptical of the process, but despite my failure to turn the mound — or give it any attention, really — it produced a load of perfect, black soil, which I distributed in several new vegetable plots in our yard and as a topper here and there for established plants.

In emptying the pile, I found that it was also trying to grow beets and broccoli.  If this year’s warm-season crop fails to produce, next year I’m turning control of everything over to the compost pile.  Something tells me it might be capable of raising 15 percent of its calories in our yard.

Apparently there is an art and, as one might expect, a science to composting.  To be clear, there is no art to my effort.  But I read extensively about the science of composting.  I chose a location that gets sun, but not a full day’s sun because here in San Diego that would most likely dry out the pile — and to function biologically, the pile needs to be about as damp as a wrung out sponge.  I dutifully watered my pile, and while I never checked the moisture content with anything technical, it never started stinking, which is an indicator that the pile is too wet.  I have also been pretty good with the carbon-nitrogen balance, not that I have ever weighed or measured anything I’ve dumped onto my pile.  The idea is, brown, dead plant material, ash, and newspaper are carbon contributors, while green clippings from the yard and animal waste (like chicken manure) are nitrogen contributors.  The C:N ratio is supposed to be 25:1.

I never turned my pile, but there are two schools of thought on that: in one school, you turn it; in the other, you don’t.  The Turning School of Compost Development says the turning evens out the composting process by mixing the less composted surface material with the more composted lower levels, resulting in a finer soil.  The turning also injects a burst of oxygen into the pile, which speeds up the aerobic bacteria and the composting process.  The Leave It School of Compost Engineering says that this very burst of productivity burns out critical components of the composting process, and disturbs basically every level of organism involved in turning stuff into soil.  Leaving it is doing it like nature does it.

But in my yard, nature hasn’t been doing it.

I have picked up a few tips along the way, little “oh, right” moments here and there.  The first came from a former student, Mike, who suggested I not dump oranges and orange peels into the pile because they are too acidic for some of the organisms at work there.  Great tip.  Stopped doing that.  Another good one: I read that two piles is essential because at some point I need to stop putting new stuff into the pile so it can finish.  That one seems kind of common-sense obvious.  I hadn’t been doing this, which might be why my pile still looks like a pile of debris.  I started a second pile last week.

Composting has many sustainable-living perks.  The two most relevant to reducing my wife and I’s impact elsewhere are the reduction in trash we send out and in the soil amendments we bring in.  The average American tosses 1,460 pounds of garbage into landfills every year.  Recycling helps, of course, but organics that won’t recycle will compost.  We throw out maybe one small bag of garbage each week (and it definitely does not weigh 70 pounds).  And even if the amendments we bring in are all organic and chemical-free, there’s still an industrial process behind whatever we add to our yard each season.  We’d rather make our own.

So, I think I’ll turn that pile this weekend.  Soon I should be getting some help stewarding the compost.  Apparently the chickens I just ordered will be a boon to the effort with their scratching and droppings.

The pile could use a boon.