A Manure Question...
 

Hi!

I live on re-claimed strip mine land in KY. It's not bad pasture, but just under the surface is clay and rocky shale. There's very little top soil. This Spring, I'll be breaking my first garden on this place.

I've been piling my horse manure (Wheelbarrow dumps) in a 20x40 spot where I'd like my garden to be. Most of the Manure has laid there in these smallish piles for many months.

I've got some old rabbit turds in the barn too, where I had rabbits a couple of years ago.

My question is, when should I stir all this stuff up and till it in?

Will the piled manure be composted and "cool" enough to use?

There's a place in my neighborhood where I can get a pick-up load of shavings anytime I want. Here's what I had in mind:

Till in all the manure, then spread out a layer of wood shavings and till it all up again. Then, maybe one more layer of shavings and plant my garden...what are your recommendations?

Thanks!

I wouldn't use the shavings. They will tie up all of the Nitrogen in your manure while they are breaking down. The bacteria in the soil that decompost the wood shavings use the available Nitrogen to make the protein their bodies are made of. When the shavings are fully decomposed, the bacteria die off and relase the nitorgen in their bodies back into the soil. Woody things like saw dust, shavings, straw, needles are better if you use them as animal bedding and let the animals do thier bidness on it, and then compost it before spreading on the garden.

A half a dump truck full of fill sand tilled in with the manure would be better than shavings. I'd put a 50lb sack of ag lime and a 50 lb sack of dolomite lime on it just to be sure you have enough calcium and magnesium. 50 lbs of each on 800 sq ft would do you for a good 3 years. The cost is probably $5/bag.

As soon as you can work your ground, I would spread the horse and bunny manure and till it in, Let it sit another 2-4 weeks and then plant. There are other microbes in the soil that will take the ammonia in the manure and turn it into nitrate for you.

With the soil you described, any kind of manure, compost, leaf mold you can add will be very helpful, as you are going to have to build your own topsoil.

Good Growing

Thanks!
 

You sound very well-schooled on the subject. I'll try it like you say!

Just don't shoot me if it doesn't work!!! :)

As you are planting you might check for earthworms. If some are already there (likely from the manure) they will multiple. If not, you might consider purchasing a suitable breed for incorporation.

It would be difficult to over-lime, with heavy clay soil in particular as the limestone will help break up the clay. pH is not a good indicator of the need for liming as too many variable affect it. If you have a soil test done have it include base saturation for calcium. You want to shoot for at least 80%.

An excellent book on this subject is More Food From Soil Science: The Natural Chemistry of Lime in Agriculture by Dr. V.A. Tiedjens. Your local library may be able to find you a loaner copy.

Ok, I really don't know about this for sure. I read somewhere that with manure (horse, at least) you should age the manure for a year before using on your garden area because it is too acidic otherwise? Once aged, it will not burn anything. Don't know if this is true or not though. Any manure I've used, I dig up from the "old end" of the pile just to be safe though.

not sure how long I left my horse manure in a pile. around 6 months I'd say. I'd go with everything Veggrower said. the sawdust would be nitrogen depleting if you haven't already used it for bedding! and yes, worms. although you most likely have some in the bottom of your piles by now. I did use raw horse manure once and burnt some flowers. cow manure ,on the other hand, I had no problem. Good Luck.

Boleyz, I'd get a couple truckloads of shavings and start a compost pile with your fresh horse manure. By next spring you'll have more compost than you need and it will be perfect for adding to the garden or enlarging it (or flowers, etc). Lucky you to have free stuff like that around! :)

Jennifer

Re-claimed means they spread grass seed; the companies seldom actually do anything about restoring the soil.

The usual problem with spreading fresh horse manure is that you're spreading horse apples. You wind up with clumps of manure that overfertilize small areas. Yours will do fine to plow in as veggie suggested.

In your place, I would building some serious compost. You already have the manure, for which many composters would arm-wrestle you. You have the wood shavings available. Build a pile of alternating layers of manure and wood shavings about four foot in diameter. When the weather warms a bit, you'll notice heat coming from the pile as the bacteria do their decomposing bit. When the pile cools, you turn it, mixing it so the outer materials are turned into the center. You can add bedding, straw, leaves, vegetable leavings, shredded paper, urine. Depending upon the weather and how assiduously you attend the pile, you should have compost to build up the soil in as little as a few weeks or in a year.

i would spread the manure and till it in as well as possible remove as many rocks as you can then plant your garden .and if the shavings are avalable use them as a mulch ,if u see signes of nitogen deficency (yellow leaves,slow growth) then use a liquide nitrogen to boost . it will take a ling time to make a garden from this spot ,but u use what u have. mabey walkways of the shavings so they will slow rot for later use would be another idea.

Buy a dump truck load of top soil and have at it.

Do NO-TILL, Level, wet, cover
 

That's right, NOTHING -- NO till, then:

• Cut the grass,
• Put down 3" or 4" of compost or well-rotted manure,
• Put down four layers of newspaper,
• Wet them down,
• Put on 8" of straw, moldy hay, leaves, etc for mulch,
• Dig hole just for the seeds and plants you will plant this year,
• Add more mulch as needed,
• If up north like we are, start garden a little later, or remove the mulch at the planting area one or two weeks before planting, to let soil warm up,
• The soil gets worked up well and there is no disruption to the rich upper layer, worms do a lot of the work, I think, and the newspaper adds to the soil, and helps keep out the weeds -- still a few -- but the newspaper blocks them -- mostly.

That's it, it works, we use drip irrigation with that system, less weeds, and if put drip, or the pump, on a timer, then you don't have to be there to water.

http://www.abceltd.com/pics/Web/NoTill.jpg
No-till start, weeds cut, manure down, cardboard down. Those black plastic pipes on the fence are our interconnected (with valves at each branch) DRIP IRRIGATION pipes. We put those down later.

http://www.abceltd.com/pics/Web/NoTillFinish.jpg
Ready and waiting for plants, seeds, and the magic of no-till. Drip pipes still on fence. Our fence is 4' of stock wire at the bottom, and 3' barbed wire, this keeps the deer out. The yellow horizontal thing on the fence is a wind-shield trap rolled up, which we don't use -- thought we needed it.

http://www.abceltd.com/pics/Web/GardenAug1605.jpg
Our Garden August, those are the flowering potatoes in front and lush peas five feet tall to the left, they went to seven feet and gave peas for months. That's Hops starting to over-run the gate, a month later it was all over the place.

We have lots of worms as mentioned, and the knotted-old hay field is loose and rich looking soil.

Good Luck with NO Till,

Alex

P.S. We ONLY put shavings on the Blueberries, and things that like acid soil. We don't use it on our garden, it would stunt our plants: guess that's based on your own soil's needs.

I'm ahuge fan of no-till as Alex is. I have used much fresher horse manure than 6 months, its only hot for along time if it still has a lot of urine in it. If you were piling it with bedding, it should be pretty well composted by now. If the pile was open to the elements its more than likely fine for use. If its steaming on cold mornings, its still too raw. I'd stop with that pile now, and start a new one. Use the old pile come spring it should be fine. I use shavings for mulch whenver I can. I just keep an eye on Ph and add lime as needed. Incorporating them does tie up some nitrogen as they break down- but if you just use in a 2-4 inch layer theres much less of that and the layers slowly incorportate as worms and other microorganisms digest them. Its really only a factor for the first year or two of usi ng htem IMHO if you keep adding manure.

As you keep adding manure in a few years it wil be a moot point as you nitrogen levels exceed annual need. Just keep addding more on top. As you put the garden to bed each year, test the soil. Add some lime on top and water in real well. Or, if your mulch is really thick, rake of fthe top layer of it (dont need to ge tit all) add that to the newest compost pile, sprinkle with lime and other ammendments as needed, cover with an inch or two of finished compost and then cover with more chips. Test again is spring.

If you get free tests there, its well worth it to do twice, if not a cheapie test kit for N-P-K is worth it too, for the checkup tests in spring. I'd get a real good soil test with ammendment recommendations at least once every year for the first few as youre building up fertility, then at least every second or third after that, and immediately if you notice problems or decrease in fertility. Treat/ammend only your beds, its more efficient and cost efective and lot less work that way. Dont treat the walkways, just cover them to keep down weeds preferably wtih a long lasting mulch (old carpets work great!) or permanant mulch of stone concrete etc. Dont walk on your beds.

Alex & LMonty...
 

I like this idea even better. There's really no point in tilling up useless clay and rocks right now. This system appears that it would work anywhere.

I've got one of the Stihl tillers that's like the Mantis...small, lightweight.

Once you get everything laid out, should you ever stir it up, or just loosen it a bit?

Also, I imagine that the mulch has to keep being added just to support the plants?

This is all new to me. I can get loads of cardboard and newsprint. I've also got a pile of sawdust that has been weathered for many wet months. Would that make acceptanble mulch, since the microbes have already "Had at it"?

Thanks

We also garden without tilling. We call is lasagna gardening because it eventually becomes layered like lasagna.

To start this whole thing off if the ground is just rock hard, we will till once and that is it. After that we laid cardboard between the rows to provide us a weed free walking area. Then we spread a decent layer of manure, lime and organic material down in the areas we intend to plant. We follow that with thick newspaper 1/2" thick at least on every square inch which we get by the truckload at local recycling dump centers. Don't use the shiny ink add papers use only the soy ink papers. We then follow that with spoiled hay which we get from anyone who has horses. The hay should be spoiled or it will take away some of the nitrogen. Once complete we had 98% weed free. And it was so easy to bend down and pick our veggies or go pick tomatoes.

One thing that must be noted is rabbit manure is the most ideal there is. It can be used straight out of the poop shoot with no burning. It comes out fertilizer ready. Plus the little nuggets are the perfect size and don't clump. They spread easy.

Now with the base layer down we simply continue to add layers of fertilizer, more newspaper, and more spoiled straw. For this coming year we just pick out our spots for our plants and start lifting the paper in that area and adding more rabbit or other fertilizer a little heavier than in the rest of the garden. Lay the paper back down, mark what goes there, and it will sit there until planting time and then we can just lift the paper and pop in our plants.

Under no circumstance use pine straw. It is far too acidic and bad for most plants. We had a local grower who swore by his pine straw and while his tomatoes were typically large, they tasted as bitter as anything I've ever eaten. We had the same luck. Bitter.

Attached is a picture of our tomatoes. We grow a variety.

[IMG]http://i108.photobucket.com/albums/n...omatoes007.jpg[/IMG]

[IMG]http://i108.photobucket.com/albums/n...omatoes008.jpg[/IMG]

One more thought on aging horse manure: When we lived in Colorado the word was to age it longer if the rotted manure would be touching edible parts of plants, like root vegetables. This is to avoid e.coli and other contamination. I can't remember the timing but I think maybe it was even one year to play it safe.

Proper composting takes care of that issue in the main by raising the temperature above where the e coli lives; simply aging or plowing the manure under does not raise the temperature.

I'd do a combination of what Alex and Veggegrower recommend.

Distribute your manures and amend it with some sand. Place down layers of about a dozen newspapers thick to stop weeds that could come up from the horse manure. The newspaper will decompose later. Add leaf mould or whatever else you got like compost. If you don't have enough, add black earth or topsoil. If you're not planting potateos in that spot, and you have wood ash, spread around a thin layer and mix that in. Plant buckwheat. Let that come up about a foot tall (don't let it get to the flower stage). It'll take about 3 weeks or so. Then take a whipper snipper and whack down that growth of buckwheat. It'll rot down, then dig a hole through any partially decomposed newspaper and plant your plants for the garden. How old is the horse manure? As long as it's not too fresh, it shouldn't get too 'hot' for the plant roots.
I'd add more mulch on top and around your transplants. seed free straw is best. If weeds come up, pull them out as soon as you see them. They are easy to get out at this stage in a no till garden. Keep mulching, you'll never need to till again. After harvest, I live far enough north to plant annual rye. That grows nice and green until a hard frost. It winterkillls for a good base to plant buckwheat the following spring, whack that down again with a weed whacker after a foot growth. repeat planting.
water with manure tea occasionally to supplement nutrients.

True, but Boleyz wasn't describing proper composting. In his original post, he said he was just duping small wheelbarrow sized piles on the garden.

wasn't muskrat responding to someone else's e-coli concerns?

Aging or plowing will bring e-coli populations down, as will freezing weather:

http://soil.scijournals.org/cgi/cont.../70/3/763/FIG1

You also have the option of using fresh livestock manure as manure tea. Put a good shovelful in a 5-gallon bucket and fill mostly to the top. Agitate well and let the solids in it settle. Pour 'tea' around the base of plants. Reportedly roses love manure tea. The settled solids can be added to your compost pile.

Adding a couple of inches of sand will help fluff the soil up and make better soil structure to help with drainage and breathing. Clay has a tendency to drown plant roots because it lacks drainage and doesn't have needed pore space.

Over time the worms will till the soil for you but an intial tilling will speed the process.

I heartily endorse the heavy mulch,"lasagna gardening" techniques suggested by others. I am one of the pioneers of this method. I used it on a 1 1/2 acre urban market garden for 13 years. In 1990 or '91, National Gardening Magazine did an article on my methods written by George Van Patten. It is nice to see that after all of the skepticism I was met with 20 years ago that this great technique has a solid following around the country.

The shavings are fine for a mulch ON TOP of the soil and in the pathways. I stand by my original advice not to till them in as you 1st described.

we built up an area some years ago with clay and shale from a ditch deepening project. first year we spread raw sheep manure and fresh horse manure, spread straw and mulched heavy. an almost complete failure! water could not penetrate the soil and the compaction from heavy equipment would not loosen with the frost. after plowing under some sand and lots of raw and composted manure plus rototilling in the spring, the soil is now friable and fertile. with the raw manure tomatoes and corn should do well! our soils tend to be alkaline but coal/shale backfills are often acidic so need balancing, we did spread some lime as well but only the first year as the ph has held. part that we just mulch has never done as well even 8 years after being infilled.

Your 2 most important issues:

Ph of the soil. Here in my part of MN, we have limestone & yellow clay soil 120 feet deep, scraped off of Canada by the glaciers a few thousand years ago. Soil is too high in PH if anything. But, if your soils are acidic, nothing else you do will be of much good. Get lime on it as soon as you can, if you need it. Plants don't use any other fertilizer very well at all, even if you have 10x too much on, if the soil is too low in ph. This is real important. It doesn't cost much for a test, farm places or your extension office can point you to a good sil lab, probably going to be $20 for the full test. Govt might even do it for you if you hit the right program..... Manure, eso horse manure, only makes things a bit more acidic, so you need to take this for real....

Second is water holding. Thin topsoil like you have will dry out real fast. Even if it is clay, anyhow around here, without organic material, it doesn't hold a good store of moisture for the plants. I've never done the no-till gardening like others show here, but that might be a real good way to go to keep soil moisture available to your plants with the multch gardening. This will depend on your soil. If it is high-clay, it will be wet & soft & goo when it's raining, but if it's like my clay sub-soil, it dries out pretty quick when it's dry. The top multch should help with both of those.

Some good multch for the future would be the manure & the shavings mixed & piled for a while. Don't use for a year or more tho, as mentioned the shavings will first tie up the N in the manure, but once 50% or more decomposed, then slowly releases the nutrients again. Would be a good plan for down the road use, or as you expand the garden.

--->Paul

Hey, what a neat idea! :) But wouldn't the tea also still burn plants like veggies, since the manure is fresh? I don't have roses.

I do avoid mixing wood chips with the manure. I am not totally convinced that the wood might not be treated with something. The stuff I clean out of the stalls (where the shavings are mixed in), I dump in the "regular" manure pile.

That which is in the paddock sitting on the dirt, I dump over the fence in a special spot....my mulch area. Sadly, no matter what techniques I use, I am horribly bad at growing anything. Well, at least I can grow beans. LOL One year I planted about 40 feet of beans. Thank heavens I didn't use fertilizer that year, I was bombarded by beans as it was! :p

DD

Where Humic Acid falls into this picture? Is it the same as manure tea or the decomposed manure tea? I'm just learning from you guys...

It is the heat in composting horse (or other) manure which can cause problems in burning roots. Manure tea would be diluted and cold.

If you were to rototill in fresh horse manure likely it would be too spread out and in a cold surrounding soil to heat up significantly.

In Ohio I knew one gardener (guy) who would urinate in a gallon jug and then emptied it, when full, over the compost pile. Urine contains urea.

I'm a bit confused at the "pulling the mulch back" and planting parts. Do you guys remove all the mulch in a planting bed to let the soil warm or do you just pull it back in small holes where you will plant seeds/seedlings/starts?

Also, when you are done for the season, do you chop down the tops of your plants to let them be part of the mulch & compost layer or just leave them and let them go to seed or whatever?

Not sure many of the edible plants we'd put in around here would carry over the winter even if we let them go to seed, except maybe potatoes... ???

Pull back at row, leave all winter, collect seed
 

hoofinitnorth,

I scrape the straw to the side along each row I will plant; not all the way to the newspaper or cardboard. I just think getting some of the thick 8" blanket off the colder soil will let it warm quicker. We try to NOT ever, not any year or time, walk where we will plant, so we don't compact it.

In the fall we pull up all plants which don't overwinter and leave all that to decompose, and we add new straw to all the plants like, strawberries, blueberries, parsley, 300 day onions, garlic, herbs, rhubarb.

OH, we put the poisonous rhubarb leaves around the OUTSIDE of the garden to help keep pests away.

All the rest, potato, pea, bean, tops of various, etc stays right there. In the spring the 8" thick pile is down to a few inches, and soil is loose and aerated under. We don't chop up the old plants, just pull them out and leave them. Suppose that would drive some nuts -- those that need everything all plowed and neat looking, but it looks good to me, because I know it works.

Potatoes don't need to go to seed, right, you just cut a piece with two eyes and plant it.

Onions, garlic, herbs, lettuce, radish, corn of course, beans and peas will be good for seed, and many others. There are many others writing posts who know WAY MORE than me about this type of information.

http://www.abceltd.com/pics/Web/Garlic2.jpg
A Hard-neck-Garlic with what I call seed pods -- the seeds pods are good to eat and have a nice garlic flavor. We planted this the fall before, this is from the year before, we planted 5 varities of garlic last fall -- should be fun.

Alex

Very cool! Sounds like something simple enough that we could try... some day! ;)

I agree to go with Alex's suggestion of no-till plus the lasagna method of layers. However, instead of Alex's suggestion of newspapers or cardboard, why not get all of your manure down now in a nice thick pile, let it "age" during the few winter month's we have, and then cover with black plastic.

With black plastic weeds will NOT be a problem, the plastic heats up the soil in the Spring, and the plastic will help hold in moisture. Perhaps putting some drip irrigation hoses under the black plastic and by the rows of vegetables will help if you have a dry spell.

I'd hate to even till up a garden, because I'm guessing the only thing you will till is clay, rocks, and shale which is not productive to gardening! Besides, the no-till is alot less work!

This no till intrigues me
 

I'm definitely going to try this method of alex and veggie, because, as was stated, I can't see much use in tilling up clay and rocks...

Great suggestions from everyone!

Ooooh, now why didn't I think of the black plastic?! We used to use this at my parents' vegetable gardens when I was a kid but mainly as a mulch. This would do double time, eh? ;) I LIKE it! Now I just have to figure out how to do my starts indoors and when to take them outside...

Yeah, Boleyz, just sift through all of the advice and pick out the stuff that makes sense to you and your situation. Just don't sweat about having it perfect the 1st year. Learn from problems and successes and keep making improvements every year. In 3 years you won't hardly know it's the same dirt.