Fighting Pine Bedding Today

Today's excitement was anything but enjoyable. For years we have been using spent bedding from our rabbits. We usually use rye straw over newspaper for bedding but last year we added pine bedding. This seems to be a major hindrance in the garden.

If you go back and look at the video of how beautiful the first bed turned over this year you will see what I am accustomed to working with. Spent rye straw and rabbit manure compost very quickly into beautiful, spungy garden soil, teaming with worms and is just generally a blessing to work with. We also usually use grass clippings as mulch to keep the weeds down and by the end of the season, the grass has composted down as well.

Last year we started using pine bedding under the rye straw to soak up urine in the rabbit cages. We use solid flooring in our hutches and we don't want our bunnies to be walking on wet bedding. Also the pine bedding was good because it cut down on mites and worked as a much cooler bedding than the straw. Straw is great in winter and we did use it over the shavings. Our bunnies love to burrow in the straw as well as dig around, searching for the rye seeds.

Weekly cleaning of these hutches results in a great deal of spent bedding that we historically use to fill the garden beds. That tradition continued over this past winter and early spring. Unfortunately, we didn't count on how long it would take for the pine bedding to compost down or exactly how much would accumulate. Apparently the rabbit manure and straw compost away leaving my bed half full of slightly composted pine shavings. Not what I was counting on at all.

Pine bedding is terribly hard, next to impossible to shovel. Even raking it didn't do a lot of good. After a great deal of time wasted in trying to turn my bed, I opted to just weed around the edges and use some soil from an old compost area. The 2' by 8' bed had to be amended with two wheelbarrow fulls of soil.

Old Compost Pile

I was finally able to plant lettuce, spinach, and carrot seeds. I also used the rest of the Walking Onions that I harvested earlier in the week. They were pretty sad looking so I trimmed the roots and stems before using them as a dividing row of sorts.

We will probably have to make an order of mushroom soil for my other beds. I'm not really happy about that.

May all your endeavors be profitable,
Jess

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