The Garden Is Taking Over My Life!
I'm not sure how this has happened. There are seedlings everywhere. My hubby and I spent a good chunk of the afternoon shoveling horse poop into the garden bed (very old horse poop, so it wasn't as bad as it might be!) Apparently there's at least 3 weeks before I can put plants in the ground (although the crocuses and daffodils are blooming!)
Will I ever get my house back?
Also, I visited one of these Just Frugal sites and they recommended starting a stockpile with free samples and coupons, and now I've got a new addiction. I've signed up for so many free samples it makes my head spin. Let's see if it really works -- as a marketing person, I've got a very cynical view of some of this stuff -- but you can never have too much free shampoo.
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Poop
Ah, horse poop is the best thing in the world! Yes, I actually LOVE the smell of it, fresh or old. In fact, sometime this week I think I'll take the 4wheeler, hook on a trailer, pull it in to the corrals and load me up a bit. Since the horses have been recently evicted to pasture and is currently empty (I'm going to put my 9 year olds diary heifers in that pen, which I hope to get this week or next. Depends on when we get water back. A WHOLE other story. I have no water, gotta dig a new well and it will be probably Wednesday).
Horse manure is fantastic for gardens
It's good you're using old manure though, if by old you mean composted. Uncomposted or raw manure has weed seeds that will take over your beds if you use it. A friend of mine made that mistake and she said she got the worst kinds of weeds and it took two years to get them all out of the flower beds!
Do you have roses? Roses LOVE manure. I read somewhere that you're supposed to apply it in fall since the dormant months are when they do their root growth.
There's a V-Shaped Scraper weeder that works wonderfully, I'm tring to find out where they sell them around here. I've seen it in action and it clears away the weedlings roots and all. A quick Internet search yeilded this picture. Don't have time to add it to TNH reviews at this moment.
Anhata
www.familynaturally.com
Your Family's General Store, Naturally
fresh manure
not a subject I know a huge amount about, but doesn't fresh manure also burn plants? Too much reading, not enough memory capacity!!
Kerri.
How fresh? I've never had
How fresh? I've never had any problems with manure that was a couple of months old. We branded a month ago then turned the cattle out to pasture, so the pens have been vacant by cows and horses since then. Wheat doesn't have any problem burning with manure. Everyone around here turns their cows out in their wheat for the winter, and take them off March 1st if they are going to harvest the wheat for hay or for grain. You can SEE the spots where the cows took a dump; it's the tallest and greenest spots out there.
Our neighbors have had
Our neighbors have had horses for 15+ years. All this time, they've been piling the manure in a huge pile behind their barn. So we went to the very, very oldest corner of the pile, and dug from there. It was under some grass/growth so we pulled that all out, and then used that.
I hope we haven't wrecked things...
You may be thinking about nitrogen burn?
If manure contains too much nitrogen it will "burn" the plants. Raw manure is called "hot" if it has higher levels of nitrogen in it. Letting it compost "cools" it and you can apply it directly to your garden with no worries.
Cow manure is "warm" and doesn't take as long to age to be safe. Which is why it's fine used the way Jennye describes.
Horse, chicken, sheep, goat, and rabbit manure are "hot" and pretty much have to be composted to be free of weeds and lower in nitrogen (safer levels anyway). Here's a really great page about compost, manure, and fertilizer.
I've read articles about raising rabbits--their manure is excellent, but if you feed them anything but bunny food from the feed store you have to compost their litter or you get wild weeds, just like from horse manure.
If the manure you used has been sitting for years in a pile, you're probably fine. Those folks are sitting on a gold mine, though. I wish I had a truck or trailer to haul off manure for our yarden. It's free around here, too, if you haul it away yourself. Our next car WILL be a truck. They're just too useful not to have. We've needed one forever.
Anhata
www.familynaturally.com
Your Family's General Store, Naturally
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