Do-Do

[gflynn]

My wife was on FreeCycle and found an offer for horse manure. I spent that last several days digging the stuff out of someone elses yard to their great pleasure. Am I really better off? :-)

I think so.

I can fill two gardens with what I dug. I am looking to a big tomato season this year!

Greg

[eddie46]

You'r going to have a lot of weeds.
Ed

[amideutch]

Don't know about the weeds. I used it last year in my surrogate garden and didn't have any more weeds than the previous year without horse manure and that wasn't many. Maybe it has to do with where they graze. And yes, the HM seemed to agree with the maters as I had a good crop compared to the year before without. Ami

[gflynn]

I usually put black plastic mulch down so I should be spared the weeds, and it sure beats buying the junk they sell at Home Depot and Lowes. That stuff is generally composted bark mixed with sand and a smiggen of actual manure.

[ReaverG]

There are 'offers' on your freecyle? Lucky...
I'd say you are definitely better off with it than without it, but then again I've never used horse manure, just a cows. It seemed to have a positive effect in those years as well. Good luck!

[habitat_gardener]

We had horse manure available at the community garden one year, so I wheelbarrowed as much as I could pile onto a couple beds (6-12 inches thick in the fall, which shrunk to half that size by planting time) and had a very good yield that year. I didn't get any weeds from the HM, but I also use lots of mulch (an inch or less of chipped branches).

Usually I add lots of homemade compost -- I figured out that I've made 300 gallons of compost a year for the past couple years. Sometimes I use comfrey tea and liquid kelp. This year I have a good crop of nettles so, after making nettle tea for myself, will be using the leftovers to make nettle-molasses-cornmeal tea for the garden.

But I'm wondering if it's worthwhile to drive somewhere to get free HM this year, since I'd like to start planting in March. The HM is at a local organic farm, which is known as the best supplier of compost around here but, I've been told, allows people to come pick up as much HM as they want. So even if you don't see HM advertised on freecycle, you can call around to stables and organic farms to find out what's available.

(Funny story -- I saw HM advertised on GW once, 3000 miles away in the town where a cousin lives, so I e-mailed her. She didn't want the manure, but her husband and daughter had been looking for a place to ride horses! So they looked into it, and have been riding there ever since. I think they even have a horse now.)

[barkeater]

I've used both horse manure (4 years), then cow manure the past 2. It's not a long enough comparison to be sure, but I had my best results with horse manure.

I had more grass weeds with HM, but I had other, more persistent weeds with CM. But, if you know how and WHEN to hoe, weeds are never an issue.

I may have put too much CM down, but it seemed much richer than the HM, maybe too rich. This year I am going to skip adding manure and just sprinkle a little 5-10-10 on top of the bed before I cover it with landscape cloth. I do add lime and wood ashes every year, and will do so again. But I think I have more than enough animal compost.

[stormymater]

Yay for Freecycle! My source for deciduous leaves, grass clippings & horse manure! I compost the poop & urine soaked sawdust with the leaves & grass clippings - nice hot bed out there now - almost 4 feet high, 4 feet wide & 8 feet long.
My only want that has not been answered is for leftover beer mash/wort - no offers. I have not yet bothered to find any places brewing their own for sale down here yet... lazy me.

PS - you are so much better off. Your garden will reward you.

[gflynn]

Stormy,

I brew beer and have much leftover mash. I have never composted it but it would be potent!

Greg

[stormymater]

gflynn - do it, do it, do it! We had a thread a while back about this very substance; the very same stuff. It is said to be the mother lode of carbs yielding huge & happy earthworms!

[daninpd]

I have 11 horses out in my pasture that get put in their stalls when it rains- that's the only time we collect the manure (mixed with wood shaving bedding and straw leftovers from their hay). When I compost this in a 10' high pile it shrinks to 2' tall in about 4 months. That's when I repile in one big pile and it shrinks about half over 6 months. That's when it gets spread over the garden- and weeds aren't a big problem because those 10' tall compost piles literally steam from the heat generated inside. Doing this with a tractor with a bucket on front is a snap. Doing it by hand is going to be work. Most of the HM you are offered for free has not been composted. Worry about e coli when using any kind of fresh manure in your gardens.

After 4 years of this program I'm starting to get really happy about the soil in my garden.

[stormymater]

daninpd - it is work! We lay a tarp in the bed of the pickup & back up to the pile. Pitchforking in the soiled sawdust/biscuit combo goes fast w/2 of us pitching. At home use use a 2nd tarp in the 2 wheeled wheelbarrow to transport out back to the compost pile. The pickup holds about 20 or so wheelbarrows full of whatever goodie I drag home. It's work but I prefer this to digging in the beds... which I do...

[brokenbar]

It is all we use. Have several gynormous piles that are ten years+ old. Mixed with wood shavings. I have very few weeds as the composting pretty well kills them all (I too have piles that "steam".) Most places that have horses kept in stalls will be DELIGHTED to give you manure and most will load you up with a tractor. (I have a friend that goes and rents a small dump truck each year and goes and gets manure. She says it is well worth the rental fee of about 100.00 per day to NOT have to shovel it out!)

Cow manure tends to be much hotter so making sure that it has composted sufficiently is important. Worms LOVE horse manure and in our old piles, there are a billion worms at work.

It is true that insufficiently composted manure will have weed/grass seed. Horses are the only animal that eats as much forage as they do that is NOT a ruminant. Ruminant's regurgitate their food over and over again so intact seed, grain, etc is broken down. Something happened in evolution because horses were ruminants at one time. Because they are not, many whole grains and weed seed pass through their GI tract unscathed (Which is why most grain fed to horses is "crimped" before feeding to allow the animal to receive the most benefit from the food stuff as is possible.)

Wood shavings are great but you must take special care to add equal amounts of manure as decomposing wood chips actually leech nitrogen from the soil to further the decomp process. A pile of woodchips mixed with manure that has been composted and aged will pose no problem.

[feldon30]

I wonder if an organic herbicide like 5% vinegar sprayed twice a week for 3 weeks would be enough to keep the grass down? Of course composted is best but free horse manure is usually not composted.

Also, could you do a lasagna style?

Dig down 8 inches, put a few inches of horse manure, a few inches of leaves, then cover with topsoil and amend with bagged compost and then after 1 season, dig down?

[stormymater]

When I am "off" with my preferred ratio - I sprinkle a cup or so of blood meal into leaves & grass clippings. I think the sawdust is "hot" enough with the manure. Still yearning for buckets of wort.... stinky, sickly sweet, oatmealy consistency wort...

ps - blood meal is waay powerful - In the Dark Ages I have burned up vegetable patches with too liberal a slinging. It took a lot of digging & work to correct that mistake... won't make that mistake again!