Chicken manure questions

So I have 16 chickens that sleep in a coop with straw as bedding (they spend the days outside). I clean it out once a week and toss it into an old raised garden bed with nothing else in it. I periodically throw food scraps in there for the chickens and they scratch up there bedding real good. The raised bed is 12in high. It is now full but I don’t know how ‘hot’ it is since I never turned it and was adding the soiled bedding to it every week up until now. If I dig down there are a TON of worms, mostly red wigglers. And it seems to be mostly broken down straw combined with compost. Would this burn my plants if I use it?

I thought I was supposed to wait a year for chicken manure to be ready--but maybe the type of bedding impacts the situation, and I haven't read up on this lately. I bet you'll get some great answers real soon!

We throw our chicken bedding right into the chicken run and they mash around in it every day. Then in the spring, we go into their run with tubs and a shovel and scoop out everything that looks like dirt and put it on the gardens to prep them for planting. Our bedding is the pine shaving type.

I think the part the worms are in is probably  fine.
I have a ~20'x4' composting area that my chickens work.
The "soil" in that is full of worms and is great for plants, though it can be rather weedy.
That said, what not start some seeds in it to be sure?
It shouldn't take long, no more than a week.

Hi Nick,
The general rule is that when you can no longer tell what the stuff is... it just looks like dirt... it is safe to use in the garden. There are all sorts of specifics and details that you can get into to get the absolute best compost in the world if you really like getting into the nitty gritty. But for most of us... just makes sure it looks like dirt, and it won't burn your plants like fresh chicken poop would.

We have a small flock of 5 and we have two bedding piles - one's a year old and the other is from this year. I take an old pillowcase and fill half of it with the year-old stuff, tie it off, and drop it in a 5 gallon bucket. I fill the bucket with water and leave the whole thing - uncovered - in a sunny place for a couple weeks. Makes a sort of fertilizer tea that I then dilute with water in a 1 to 4 ratio (usually 1 gallon tea to 4 gallons of water), then I spray that on my garden periodically throughout the growing season.

So far it's worked great - no burning. I'd imagine if you dug down to the bottom of the pile you'd find some older, more decomposed bedding and manure that might work for this purpose. Although I'm not sure how you'd avoid mixing the newer stuff in. I wonder, though, if a small amount of newer compost might be okay given how diluted this fertilizer tea is.

William Bronson wrote: I think the part the worms are in is probably  fine.
I have a ~20'x4' composting area that my chickens work.
The "soil" in that is full of worms and is great for plants, though it can be rather weedy.
That said, what not start some seeds in it to be sure?
It shouldn't take long, no more than a week.

Good idea with the seeds, I’ll do that.

I just put 20 gallons of  chicken curated compost in a bed at my sister's house.
Planted peas directly into it, I'm expecting rain tonight.