The Key is in the Dung. Manure information:

Manure is a lovely thing in which so much organic matter comes together in one convenient place, which is why it has such a nice place in our hearts as composting gardeners.

The following are the NPK (Nitrogen, Phosphorous, and Potassium) readouts for the most common manures. These can help one to decide how much to add to a pile.

Chicken
1.1-.8-.5

Dairy Cow
.25-.15-.25

Steer
.7-.3-.4

Rabbit
2.4-1.4-.6

Sheep
.7-.3-.9

Horse
.7-.3-.6

These numbers are not enough, and bear some further explanation:

Chicken manure, according to the nature of birds, is unusual in that (High-nitrogen) urine is integrated into the manure. Such high nitrogen content will ferment and evaporate (smells like and is, in fact, ammonia) if the fresh manure is not immediately composted.

Dairy Animals differ from field-fed creatures simply because of difference in diet to encourage milk production. When salt blocks are fed to animals, the manure obviously has dangerously high salt, and this should be determined before compost or garden application.

Bovines of any kind break down their food by far more than single-digesting animals. Cow manure is finer in texture, and unfortunately has lost much useful organic matter that would contribute to soil structure.

Horses have a near-perfect manure, (low natural salt, high organic content) the one drawback being that certain feeding grounds can introduce a nuisance of weed seeds to the manure. A person can find horse manure from animals that have not been eating seeds that will remain viable and pester the gardener.

Rabbits have a uniquely high vegetable-based metabolism that is highly consumptive, and thus is one of the richest in nitrogen that is less likely to ferment and evaporate like chicken manure.

For the purpose of garden-addition, aged manures are preferable.
For the purpose of composting, fresh manure is preferable.

The ideal conditions would be immediate composting of fresh (new leaves, fresh dung) material (which “locks” in the nutrients.) which, when finished, would be immediately added to the soil after the radical hot composting is finished. (Thermophilic composting.) The remaining unbroken particles would be consumed by the soil and worms within. This ideal method would take maximum advantage of matter, letting as little of it escape before your garden plants can consume it.

Please add any of your own comparisons or experiences with other manures,
K. James

I use horse manure exclusively at the moment (I have 7 horses) & LOVE IT!!!!

Do have a certain amount of grain sprouting sometimes if the manure & bedding I'm using hasn't had a chance to compost/heat up sufficiently, but if pulled up in a timely fashion, I haven't found it to be a problem.

I will say that horse manure produces the lovliest compost one can imagine - dark, rich, & crumbly. I love it. And it produces the lovliest vegetables imaginable as well.

Here Here! I find the grain seedlings nominally time-consuming. They are easy to kill, and are certainly not a counter to the incredible growth of garden plants! Horse manure also has the soil-structure effect of peat moss, but differs in being better at it and full of nutrients. (-which I'm afraid peat cannot claim much to.)

I have an area that had recieved annual and liberal applications of peat. Each year, the Ricinus grew no taller than 8.' The spring that saw an equal horse-manure application instead of peat saw the following result:

(http://davesgarden.com/pf/showimage/91866/)

In my experience in both grazing and gardening land, horse manure can sour the land with many years of sole usage, by sour I mean make more acidic. This isn't to say only horse manure can do this but using one species manure all the time, particularly in quantity, is a bit like us eating the same meal every day for years. If the soil already has a naturally low pH, this is not such a great problem but it is something to keep an eye out for and an opportunity to bring up the 'check your soil structure, nutrient and pH content every now and then' gardening tip.

Chicken manure can be very strong in the N department and best applied at times of the year when strong leafy growth is taking place or is required, in the middle of winter or summer it's pretty much a waste of good fertilizer.

Sheep manure is good and fleece, if you can get hold of it can make a good winter mulch (and hanging basket liner).

The farms around here have no problem getting rid of cow or any other manure to gardeners. The winter housing straw and manure all well rotted mix is fine for most things and not quite so acidic as horse.

This message was edited Dec 29, 2005 2:11 AM

James you forgot worm castings. They sell a lot of them around here to cattle peole for tea for their pastures.

I am waiting right now for a call from Central Missouri Poultry Producers in order to see if they will sell me a pickup load of composted turkey and chicken manure. And James they compost it in a Compost drum at the rate of up to 50 tons at a time. Drum is 50 ft long and 10 ft in dia. turns one time every 14 minutes and it had heat to maintain 145 degrees in the drum. It is 50 miles from here I went and looked at it. They have a web site they sell them in smaller forms they are called Early bird compost.

I would like to bump this thread after reading that horse manure acidifies the soil. I have a huge pile, 3 tandem truckloads of horse manure (with bedding). pH testing of the finished compost yielded about 7.25. This seems inconsistent with the reports above.

Could I have chosen a bad sample? Could the sawdust bedding affect the pH?

I would like to use this in raised beds in the greenhouse, but I have held off given the pH sensitivity of some of the subtropical plants.

TIA, SB

I never have to give a thought to acid problems in my soil that ranges between about pH 7.6-8.1!

Aged and fresh-applied manure has major differences. Everything, really, has a pH, so I am sure that bedding will affect it, and Baa takes note of this in her last sentence.
I hope you find what works for you in your greenhouse. Peat is slightly acidic, perhaps that would make a foil to it?
K. James

I'll test a few more samples. I'm shooting for pH of about 6.5 for most of these plants, and with peat + manure I've gotten down to 6.75 in most of the beds. I'd rather use the manure than the peat, though, for obvious reasons. Thanks! SB

Fresh horse manure does usually have a pH of around 7-7.5, it's less acid in its fresh form than other many livestock manures however if I may quote myself :)

"In my experience in both grazing and gardening land, horse manure can sour the land with many years of sole usage, by sour I mean make more acidic. This isn't to say only horse manure can do this but using one species manure all the time, particularly in quantity, is a bit like us eating the same meal every day for years"

I'm not saying horse compost is acidic what I am saying is that like other materials horse manure produces acids while it is decomposing which can and does affect the soil pH over a long period of time. It is also true to say (as I suggested in my quote) that this is the case with many types of composting material and it is better to vary the composted materials you use.

Horse manure is freely available to lots of gardeners where as a range livestock manure may be more difficult to obtain at least in the western world so like pastures that have been grazed by horses over many years, gardens that have only used horse manure can end up with the same problems as the pastures. With this in mind it is important that the horse manure is fully composted before use, many people know not to use fresh manure but will happily apply half composted manure which can still cause problems.

What I am saying is that its fine to use fully composted horse manure, it's one of the best for a number of nutrients but don't put all your eggs into one basket and give your soil a different meal from time to time.

This message was edited Jan 15, 2006 5:42 PM

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This message was edited Jan 15, 2006 5:39 PM

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This message was edited Jan 15, 2006 5:38 PM

My apologies in my initial post on this thread my last paragraph does read

"The farms around here have no problem getting rid of cow or any other manure to gardeners. The winter housing straw and manure all well rotted mix is fine for most things and not quite so acidic as horse."

What I meant was that a well rotted mix doesn't cause the acidic problems that soley using horse manure can over a long time.

Good day...It's a lovely spring like day here, and I am expanding my front garden.. I have the dirt, my black gold (mulch) some chicken and cow contributions, and I'm having a dilemna about adding straw. I have a bale out there right now, and I'm hesitating becaue I'm not sure how well straw breaks down.. I'm about to roto til the mixture in a minute.. Any quicky advice will be so appreciated.! I look like a dirt clod right now :) that mean I'm pretty happy!
Rj

RJ, "The best things in life are dirty... The worst thing in life is Wakin' up clean without a bean..." from Paint your wagon.

Straw will break down in less than one growing season if there is plenty of nitrogen available (which I assume you have in the Chicken/cow dung) My experience with straw (I'm not sure what kind it was, you might find out) left me with a virtual lawn of hay-srouts coming up in my garden. Staw is best composted before addition to the garden, as it is used here because it takes time to break down as a mulch. Technically, the best thing to do would be to mix the dung with the staw first. After it has composted a while, till it in. However, I must admit to having no problems when I tilled in a balance (dung/leaves) of uncomposted matter into my soil. I have read that straw, due to it's shape, can be very helpful in aerating when tilled in.

What do you think, Baa? -and thanks for the fill-in.
Continued applications of organic matter year after year of (near?) any kind will affect pH. That is why rainy (and thereby more naturally vegetated) areas usually have lower pH. The pH of the native inorganic geological material (bedrock) is hard to fight too. As I understand, you can try to change the pH all you want, but just remember that your little flower bed is competing with billions of tons of native soil that doesn't aggree with you! I will always have 7.5 soil in my garden...

Baa: I'm currently "amending" a bed; this is an experiment like everything I do. It was an old mum bed that had remained dry enough that the only amendment- a topdressing last year- was not mixed in by worms, etc. I shoveled aside the 3" (sorry for the Imperial measures) of original topsoil and it's home-compost and leafmold topdressing, removed at least one foot of soil entirely, (not returning it to the bed; it was downright horrible, no organic matter to speak of.) forked the bottom, and filled the rest in as such:

4" of woodchips rotting in mature soil (dug from an area where I buried massive amounts of woodchips) and the rest mixed on top of that: 3" of the original topsoil, about 3" of chicken manure/hay compost and what must be worth about 6-8" of horse manure, (mix of fresh and old) making the new bed about 1-3" higher than the old soil level, which should change as the amendments break down.
I should note that there is no interface in all of this, I mixed and forked everything painfully well, leaving a woodchip-rich broken strata on the bottom, and a consistent mixture above that to the surface.

Now my back hurts terribly.
Things had better grow there next year!

If you think that is crazy, I should not tell you what I did to my main garden.
K. James

Thankyou very much!! I feel better now...I'll toss a light bit of straw, and save the rest of it for another project!
I sure appreciate it!!
Rj

We are huge fans of horse manure here. We kind of have to be in that there are 30 of them here on our ranch. We thermophyllic compost the manure, bedding, uneaten hay mixture, then once the mesophiles have taken control we introduce earthworms (wigglers, E. foetida). The resulting 'vermi'compost is just amazing for our soils (silty sand/decomposed granite) producing wonderful growth. We also must irrigate our piles so we collect the effluent which ends up being a fabulous compost/casting tea. We produce somewhere in the neighborhood of 350-400tons of the compost per year of which we use over half each year in our gardens on the ranch. We figure we save somewhere in the neighborhood of 15k per year in compost/casting purchases and manure hauling.

the piles

the tea, we love this stuff and find that the combination of thermo/mesophyllic composting and the wigglers keep the noxious weeds to a minimum (bermudagrass seed viability is almost completely eliminated). As a plant tonic, this tea has really been very effective when mixed with a bit of Maxicrop.

Doc, that's the ultimate compost system. I, with my but small amount of materials and space, do the same thing whenever I can on a smaller scale. It is by far the fastest and most perfect thing since the electric toaster!

I have accidentally mixed up piles and toasted worms with Thermophiles! 160 degrees is just a bit warm for our little annelid freinds. Isn't E. foetida the redworm?

I assume that you have some good equipment to turn and haul all of that. Do they make a tractor-attachment version of the whisk-style windrow turner/waterer?

Kenton

Stressbaby. I am sure you got a powerful lot of oak sawdust in those beddings and maybe a lot of cedar as well. I bet that is where the acid comes from. Well you can add line if it gets to bad you know. I do not know what kind of a operation you got up there but down in High Point off C below Jeff City the Central Missouri Poultry Producers. got a commercail operation. you can contact them at Earlybird Bompost.Com. They sell commercail compost drums of several sizes. the one they use is 50ft long and 10ft in dia. Takes raw turkey barn littler from raw to black compost in 4 days.

Now I'm a little confused, tell me your thoughts on what I did...good or bad.

I recvd a truck load of horse manure, a lot of old, but some fresh (my girl friend cleaned out her horse stall) The horses are fed hay right now due to no grass growth here in the winter.

I cleaned out my chicken coop also. Manure and straw.

On a bare spot in the yard where the chicken coop sat all summer I layered leaves the chicken coop material and the horse manure. It's been out there for about a month.

Should I stir this up or just leave it layered? Since my chicken material and most of the horse manure was old, will it not heat up good since it's been cold a few days. The average temps in the last month has been 40 degrees here, but does dip down at night.

I was hoping this bed would be ready to plant this spring, what do you think?

Mix it well. Hopefully mixing it will enact some mesophilic bacteria at least to have it ready.

Next time you have old horse manure, amend it directly into the bed. Definately compost the chicken bedding.

I should note that I have some very important and revealing salt statistics for manure from my Master Gardening text. I'm currently away from home, but will add this info when I can.

I am afraid that I'm not having a good experience with Chicken compost. I like to do a little test: take a small pot of a the material in question and plant a fast-growing bean in it to test for major toxins, etc. I realized today that my test bean should have long been growing by now, and checked on the bare pot. The chicken compost had hardened into a concrete like chunk, and I'm sure that the bean is either suffering or dead within. Part of that salt info says that chicken manure is extremely high in salt. (When I went to the egg-farm, I had hoped to collect some raw high-N manure, but they only sell finished compost. I'm afraid I couldn't resist that dark stuff.) This is what I get for being compost-greedy, eh?

I have only used some of it in my newest bed, and the jury is still out on whether I want to deal with flushing salt out of my newest project... Salts are more of an issue here than in other places, and this is not just a little bit of chicken.
Sun of a Gun.

Kenton

LBMoore why don't you just buy the compost bulk. since your in Missouri there is ample compost coming out of these turkey barns all over the state. I got a mantis Tein and i do make some compost but I paid $30 a scoop for turkey compost.

I probably have missed this but why do you need to add worms to compost? My compost piles even the newest are magnets for several species here in Montana. Am I just lucky? Also I always thought I was a manure specialist being a veterinarian. But I guess taste doesn't count for much.

Well my goodness,an extended discussion about manure!....just what i was looking for! Perhaps someone can answer my questions.Last spring my husband prepared raised beds with top soil and well-rotted horse manure -1/3 top soil 2/3 manure.The plants in this bed grew much too tall..zinnias that were to be 18'' were 5',Daturas were 10' etc...I also had enormous insect and disease problems in these beds.It was not "mushy" growth,many of the stems of plants,or shall I say"trunks" as they were as big around as my arm-were tough.Also had a profusion of thorny growths or stiff hairs on many plants that were not present on the same plants grown in different sites.I do not want this to happen again this year. Can anyone give me advice on what to do? What should I add?
here is a pic to give some idea...those were to be dwarf sunflowers!http://davesgarden.com/forums/fp.php?pid=1669603
Thanks for any input
Gail

golgi I know there is toooo much horse manure in the mix to start with. Take a sample and have it examined byt your county extension agent. what you had last year has dramically changed this year I would bet on it. But have it tested. Have no idea what the horse manure had in it. The fresh manure is what drew the bugs.

Soferdig: Worms are simply min-rototillers that increase soil structure and mix amendments on the fine level with the soil. Worms do not create good soil, but are essential in its presence.

Gail: I'll bet your monster plants used up the ecxess Nitrogent that the plants had last year. Too much nitrogen can be bad- plants will often be weaker to pests, cold, etc. (especially when nearby a wild-vegetation area) I think that by adding a bit of sawdust or fine woodchips, you could pull the extra N out if it isn't used already. Must have been fresh horse manure?

That bed will be perfectly rich in organic matter in following years. Happy Gardening and luck on next year!

Thank you so much for your prompt responses! It really was VERY well rotted manure..beautiful stuff,really. I hope it was just too much nitrogen,and that it is mostly spent by this year. We will be adding more top soil to the beds. I am telling you,the thorn issue was bizzarre! Everything had them and/or the stiff stinging hairs.As a cutting flower bed it was a nightmare! I have grown most of these plants before and never seen anything like it.Perhaps it was a response to the insect infestation.

Ozarkian, thanks for the tip. I get fresh horse manure (plus the bedding) from the equestrian department at our local college by the tandem truckload, no charge. Pampered horses, no weed seeds. I try to stay a year or two ahead. The 8 tandem truckloads I got 2 years ago aren't nearly gone yet.

I did some research on horse manure and bedding some time back. Here is what I found:

C:N ratios
Wood shavings 400:1
Fresh manure 25:1
Typical barn mix of above 80:1

Apparently this relatively high C:N ratio isn't great for composting. An old-timer (with a PhD in horticulture!) told me to apply nitrogen to aid in the decomposition. Has anyone tried adding N to move along the composting of a manure/bedding mix?

SB

Golgi; (great name by the by) Plants will do some wild stuff to protect themselves.

I've added N to a pile that had a C:N ratio above 30:1. It works if there is too much carbon (it is obvious, because straw will not break down in such conditions). Now I need to get out the Master Gardener text...

golgi...no doubt you had a good dose of N in your bed. Even thought the manure was well decomposed it would still offer a nice source of N (as well as other nutrients). If it was sitting in a pile outside for years though much of that N would be lost and most likely leach out due to rains/weather.

You plants in your pic sure ARE tall...however, the sunflower growth I noticed would be a normal height; as for the datura (datura stramonium, it looks like?) is very tall for the "wild" variety. I'm wondering if the tallness of the plants could also be due to low light levels...was this bed in an area that didn't get much sun? If so, plants will tend to reach for daylight and will natually grow taller.

The spines and such...no bearing whatsoever on the N content but definitely has to do with either the weeds in the horse pasture OR the fact that the pile of manure sat in an area and weed seeds blew into it over time. I've seen many a "stable sweepings" pile sitting outside horse barns that really grew LUSH weeds! (Oh yeh, the "stiff stinging hairs" you mention are most likely stinging nettle...a weed not only good to eat, and good for you, but also one that will make a fantastic compost tea/leach if you chose to use them for that.)

Personally, I wouldn't dare add any sawdust to your beds. I'd first take a sample (as Ozarkian suggested) OR invest a small amount of $ into a nutrient kit or probe (you'll use it many times in the yrs to come) and take a reading from it. They are good enough for this type of usage. (However, remember, most Ag Depts will give you a soil test for free, so don't give up that avenue.)

What you can also do, is dig the bed a bit, loosening up the soil/manure mix and let your rains/snows temper it a bit. They will help to leach out some of the N but yet not eradicate it altogether. At the first sign of planting, broadcast some Laxton's Progrees #9 garden peas in it...they'll love the N and give you a nice crop of English peas and when you're tiried of picking them turn the plants under, thereby adding green matter to the medium and increasing the tilth. You can then plant whatever you like, based on your nutrient test/AG test results. If high in N still (which I doubt) plant a heavy feeder (ya like corn!? Yummy!).

Happy Gardening! Will be waiting for your test results and/or choices you've decided to make!

Shoe.

Ah, look at those big trees in the background. Low light and high competition. Nice, Shoe.

Alrighty,Shoe,I'll send off a sample to my county extension.And by golly,early peas DO sound good!
BUT!.... the bed is facing south with trees BEHIND it,the hairs and thorns were on named cultivars of plants,the sunflowers were to grow 21/2 to 3 feet (hah!),zinnias to 18",not to mention the castor bean I yanked out because it was blocking the sun from the trees...! Even had soft thorny growth on a Japanese morning glory "yuuzuki". Have occaisionally seen this on ipomoea tricolor but NEVER on Ipomoea nil.
To be clearer,though,the hairs were not stinging like nettle,with chemical irritants(i.e. histamine,acetycholine)but irritated my skin nontheless,like fiberglass will.Told the deer they could 'have at it' if they wanted,but even THEY stopped after a few nibbles and moved on to the green peppers in another bed.
Really a bust of a bed.

Vigorous plants, close company (probably the biggest cause), and a few bugs will do that thorny business.
I wouldn't call it a bust. Just a first-year balancing out.

Just plant those peas like shoe says and don't plant as many seeds there next year.
Good Luck, hope you are satisfied with it next year.

Soon, golgi will be braggin about the peas and showing us pics to make us all jealous! Oh m'goodness!

Thanks for the additional info/update, golgi. So it sounds like you purposefully planted the "stinging plants"? I wonder what would cause thorny growth on plants that are not known to have thorns? Any ideas? Kenton, bugs will make thorns? Or do you mean their 'eating habits' would make something appear to be growing thorns?

Well shoe with the way that stuff has grown we can be sure she did not put any Alum in there huh??

Hah! You dawg! You've been reading a few other threads floating around here, eh!?

Funny! *grinnin' :>)

Shoe you have not forgotten to wash your hands like i told you right.

Bug action can stimulate plants to grow thorns, no joke. Same with plant poisons, etc.

I wonder if it isn't too early to at least put peas in the ground this time o' year.. Do you know, Shoe? I have a new bed to try out.

Ozark...I hear ya! You ruint me! I now am trying to get into the habit of washing hands before and after! Am running scared here! :>)

Kenton, in our area they say we can plant peas 75 days before our last frost. (Personally I won't plant them any sooner than 60 days before our last frost.) We can also successive plant them up until March 1st, which is 40 days before our last frost.

You could use those time frames as a guideline for your area. I'm not familiar w/your frost dates.

And if you plant the lower growing varieties (like Laxtons Progress #9, mentioned above) you wont have to stake them if you broadcast the seeds. They'll grow so closely together they will support each other.

Thanks for the info on the bugs/thorns!
Shoe.

I guess it is really not the need for peas, but to have something growing as soon as possible in the soil to get the soil ecology going. How are beets or radishes in relation in time to peas? (I'm a carrot person myelf) Our average last frost is April 20th or so, but we have a very short spring.

Thanks shoe,
Kenton