how to age manure ?

I need to start out by letting you know that I live in the 'burbs

I manure every winter with purchased bags.. it gets expensive, but the plants love it the heat it gives off allows me to plant 8-12 weels before last frost under a hoophouse. there are several stables nearby. assuming I can get a truckload of manure from them (I have the pickup).. can it be aged(perhaps under the 80-100 large bags of leaves and chicken bedding that i shred and compost every year . the neighbors may object to the smell.

I do put bunker (fish) under the piles as well as striper and bluefish scraps - with minimal smell..

how do we go about aging a yard of horse manure.
(got laid off and need a plan 'B') the good news is i have time
thanks for any ideas
-joe-

Hi, Joe - I grew up in the English countryside, so the smell of manure is not something that bothers me - but I do appreciate that others may not feel the same way.

One big problem with any fresh manure is that it attracts flies. The only suggestion I have is that you dig some trenches, put in the manure and cover with the soil you just removed. After a few months, you could either put in your plants directly, or mix the manure and soil together.

Aged manure usually does not smell - I used aged horse manure when I lived in South Florida without problems.

Thanks honeybee..

another queastion ot two - if i remember correctly you are working in heavy clay as well.

for the manure.. does it make sense to drop it into trenches now, cover than till in with composted leaves for spring planting.. directly into the garden.

or is the age one year item i hear about something that needs to be done? aging over winter seems best as windows are closed on surrounding houses until spring.. I am in the 'outer 'burbs' ' close to an acre per plot with many subdivided to 1/2 and 1/4 acre one block down.

I prefer manure - i am used to fish and seaweed. ( considering blood and bonemeal but the critters love it too).. fresh manure can be picked up at some local stables.

the backgroundscenario;

the beds I am reworking were softened with peat years ago. I am just finishing mowing down 100 large bags of leaves to compost.. I am attampting to remediate some heavy clay for corn and peppers.. I tested with the aggies and am just below adequate levels to deficient in some beds. nitrogen is near absent - potassium is barely adequate , the rest is ideal. ( althouigh the eggplant and cukes seem to love the heavy clay tilled with osmocote and will not be altered.) five years of fertilizer has slowly reduced the garden production . Neighbors gardens i helped put together over the years are starting to match my yield. (proud of them, but i still am young enough and raised in the suburb lifestyle to be always competing with mr jones.)



I was laid off and want to take full advantage of the time. the first 8-10 years corn, squash, and root crops were always tilled from previious year fish guts from long island sound.. i no longer fish too often and sail a dinghy instead..... just how much manure is used typically..( ballpark is fine- i have around 2000 sq feet)

thank you again for your experience and time.
-joe-

Count the rings?

Sorry - couldn't resist. ;o)

Al

jjconcepts - Yes, I'm currently working with heavy clay, although it's in far better shape now than it was three years ago when I moved here.

Because the winter is cold, the manure will not break down quickly, either above or below ground. Some would suggest covering the manure with black plastic to supply needed heat, but I've never done this.

I assume compost bins are out of the question in your area, so I think placing the manure in trenches with some of your mowed-down leaves would be a good idea. Come next spring, you can dig/till the whole thing together with some organic fertilizer and you should be good to go. The earthworms will gladly work on this for you over the winter. If you don't have enough earthworms - Gardens Alive sells them. These are not the same as "Red Wigglers" they live in compost piles, but will not survive in the garden.

This link will explain things:

http://www.gardensalive.com/product.asp?pn=5300

Here's the link to the earthworms:

http://www.gardensalive.com/product.asp?pn=8815

If your horse manure is "hot" (not aged) the earthworms will avoid it until it has aged. They know what they are doing :) so don't worry about them.

This may be redundant because I recently posted something along these lines in another thread. I add fresh horse manure directly to the garden each fall and disc it in immediately. After several weeks and hopefully a rain I disc the horse manure again. The 'buiscuits' are vertually gone after the second discing. When I first started using horse manure this way I piled it as much as a foot high before discing. I then had a garden soils analysis run which came back too high in everything, especially ammonia nitrogen. In the spring I tilled the gound again and there were no problems with my plants that year.

I use a pull behind tiller on my Sear's tractor mower and turn the ground three times at least for each tilling. Some would say this is way to much tilling. Reason being the ammonia nitrogen in the horse manure is probably pretty well depleated since it is fairly volatile. The Organic-Nitrogen which makes up the majority of the nitrogen in this form of fertillizer is a slow release, and can last for several years.

When I do garden soils analysis, I ask for a TKN or Total Kjeldahl Nitrogen as well as Ammonia Nitrogen and Nitrate/Nitrite Nitrogen. The Organic Nitrogen is a calculation: [TKN - (Ammonia Nitrogen + Nitrate/Nitrite Nitrogen)]. These garden soils tests also include Potasium and Total Phosphorous as well as micro-nutrients if you wish. The soils lab I use in Dodge City includes a bar graph showing the range of these nutrients from Poor to Good to Excessive. This garden soils test is around twenty dollars. A proper garden soils sample is one where you take at least 10 samples from various locations in your garden.

I also compost horse manure in three outdoor bins, which I use in a number of ways when planting in the spring. I can not recall ever having a problem with this material being too "hot".


Commercial farming today uses a lot of liquid ammonia applied in the spring to the fields. I see a lot of this in the mid-west where farmer's use the no-till method because of their poor sandy soils to grow wheat. So my conclusion is, when in doubt about using fresh horse manure, cow manure, or any other type of animal muanure directly to the garden, till~till~till.

excellent description.

i will be dropping a hot pile in, and covering with several feet of shredded leaves. the pile will be turned before it freezes in january than spread and till in the spring. I am hoping the hot leaves will help to keep it warm and keep the smell more contained.
-joe-

joe, I just received a response to a thread on adding ammonium nitrate to a compost pile from docgripe. He gave me a brief description of the brown/green ratio plus Black Strap Molasses he uses. I have seen his postings on this in earlier threads and have down loaded a considerable amount of his comments and recommendations in the past on various subject. These composting threads are more than a year old, but I believe they would be helpful if you went back some and reviewed this topic. doc is a prolific responder and one of my top five favorites as a 'non-Uber'.

Also joe, I've got to ask...what are bunker fish?

I will look back at some.. a lot of people seem to add something. lime, ammonia, molasses?

hmmm

if you could link to some useful threads, it seems you went through a lot already.
bunker is a prolific saltwater fish aroud 8 inches. not good for eating but a favorite food for the striped bass and bluefish we catch with bunker. The bunker schools up and often gets chased in schools of hundreds and maybe thousands into the shallows and harbors where they get so packed in you can almost scoop them out with a 5 gallon bucket. most times when this happens most of them die from being too concentrated. I go out with a toss net and a few pails thet i can fill in under an hour. some for bait, some for the garden. The fishing is great here. in early spring and late fall we take kayaks out bout a mile or two and catch 25-54 inch fish we grill, make a form of canned tuna from the bluefish to freeze and get a years supply of fish sticks.

-joe-

joe, docgripe just sent me a chemical composition and source where he purchases mill run cane black strap molasses which I intend to use for my outdoor horsemanure compost bins and some indoor vermiculture/composting bin experimenting. The thread is a recent one I started asking a question about using ammonium nitrate as a kick starter in the compost bin.

We have got to talk more about this fishing joe, but I don't want to upset Sandy by turning this thread into a different subject. I use fish parts extensively in my garden expecailly where I plant my pumpkin seeds. I will DMail you some questions on the fishing, or if you like we can take this to a fishing thread here on DG. Your choice joe.

morgan

either way.. the indians taught the pilgrims how to grow corn by throwing a fish in a hole with corn..

i live 1/2 mile from the shore in an area with plenty of harbors and wetlands. many people use fish emulsion, which I believe is fish soaked in water.

i have used a lot of fish.

-joe-

When man started screwing up the great grasslands they were working with up to ten percent natrual organic content. Because of man's monoculture practices those wonderfull great grasslands where monoculture practices still prevail are down to almost non-existant organic content. We hope the continued use of these practices has not gone beyond the possiblity of basic recovery. There are no more good really good soils to move onto. Those acres are all pretty much bombed out with synthetic fertilizers. Fortunately we backyard gardeners and relatively small truck farmers can indeed bring back our small plots. At the same time we should not be abrasive towards the pathetic overall conditions which will not be easy for anyone to correct. The book Silent Spring written I believe in the early fiftys clearly projected the conditions we face today.

jjconcepts writes "many people use fish emulsion, which I believe is fish soaked in water". Okay joe, you've got me thinking about another experiment. doc's malasses comments have got me working on an idea to kick start my outdoor horse manure compost bin, and making a fish emulsion from fish guts might be interesting as well. Lately the wild cats have been digging up the fish guts I burry in the garden, so I might try your fish emulsion idea before disposing of the fish guts.

The experiment doc got me started on is to prepare an anerobic emulsion with the peelings I grind up in a blender with gravel syphoned aquarium water. Instead of direct feeding this mix I have placed it in several 5-gallon pails to ferment. I added some molasses to this emulsion as well. I place a lid on the pails and let the blend sit and ferment for a few days. Before feeding the worms, I stir the ferment mix, add two cups to the blender. and do a quick blend with egg shells and some coffe grounds. Worms are devouring this mix more rapidly then the direct feed from the blender which is usually pretty chunky.

In the spring I will add an entire worm compost bin directly to the outdoor horse manure compost bin. This may well be the jump start I'm looking for.

I do not have a fish source of the magnitude mentioned above. When I did............I would have ready made trenches into which I could dump bucket fulls and cover immediately with any and all the organic gatherings I could find. In order to keep critters out of my mines here I would need the trenches to be about eight to ten inches deep. The few raw fish parts I get now on rare occasions I just dig a hole and burry them any place I have open soil.

When I lived on the shore and was trying to develop soil that was almost pure sand I used the permanent trench method. There I could get a couple five gallon buckets full of raw fish waste daily if I wanted that much. I mixed that with horse manure with rough sawdust used as the bedding. I planted whatever at the edges the open trench. By the middle of the summer the trenches were filled. The next year I planted on the year old trenches and opened new trenches. I had decent recovery and crops the second year when planting on last year's trenches. I was only there for four growing seasons. I don't know how long I might have kept that going. There we did not have much easily available makings of traditional compost piles. There were rules against traditional piles but trenching was OK at that time. That also was a case where we had the ocean at the back of our property and on occasion backwater brackish water that would flood nearly our whole yard. Where the trench method was active the recovery from such torture was guite noticeably faster than the rest of the yard. At the best that was a difficult dig so to speak.

JJ - I do this, too. my neighbors can't object to the smell for long, because I actually purchase the manure from a local stable. they use a small bobcat to load it for me, the price basically pays for the gas to run the bobcat and the hired hand's time. ($10 - that's worth me having to dig it). They are smart enough to give me the oldest manure first. they have a small hill of it. Once it turns black and starts looking like soil, I'll use it, and that's what they try to give me the most, though some newer does mix in a bit.

The newer manure is lighter in color and the bedding, whether sawdust or shaving or straw, is still light in color, so you can, once you get the hang of it, tell the difference. Once it is aged enough, that smell goes away. What I buy smells for 24-48 hours like a manure pile. After that, no manure smell, more like a rich earth smell. I've noticed their pile, out in the open, has little odor either, but you start digging in it, lifting it into the air, and you'll get that manure odor.

At another place, I had to load it by hand. It didn't look very old, so I laid it out in an area between trees where the ground had sunken a bit. When I went back to get some six months later, found out those trees were very happy - the manure pile was filled with new tree roots and impossible to dig! And is full of worms, too. I might do this all over that entire area.

Don't know about your stable, but most have a manure pile somewhere out of the way.

oh - if it's fresh manure, protect your truck. the acids and ammonia are very hard on your paint job and plastic bedliners.