do you separate the manure piles by breed? goat, cow, horse, poultry etc? ....I am sorry but I couldn't help but laugh at this one...I had a mental picture of all those piles lined up in a row...

Truthfully I think any manure is great for the garden but rabbit is the only one that I know of that can go right away into the garden without burning...The rest needs to be composted...it will help also with the weed seeds...cause I can tell you that you use manure in your garden and next springyou will have a garden with a hay crop...Now ask me how I know this? For my manure composting I just keep it piled up and use it in the compost pile as needed...layering as usual...

Sheep manure can be put directly on the garden without waiting just like rabbits.

Horse manure will have weeds.

Cow manure does not.

I have a friend who has 2 donkeys and 2 mules.
I know this may sound stupid, but is there ANY different
in the manure from these animals compared to horses?
And can it be added in the spring?
Tom

My experiance is that you can use any equine after it heats up and cools down. The important part for a weed free compost is the heating up process. Right now I have a huge pile of mixed horse and poltry bedding that is steaming it's way to perfection.

What I usually do is pile it as high as I can get it, about 4 feet high in a rough pyramid shape. Then let it sit until it has heated up, cooled down and reduced to about half it's volume. If you can get it turned so much the better! It "cooks" faster and has few sprouts to deal with. (Raw horse manure tends to sprout oats.)

How long to cook depends on the weather, summer 30 to 60 days winter 90 days. I have a summer pile and a winter pile. I put the summer pile on the garden in the fall, and the winter pile on the garden in the spring.

There are folks who spread compost and plant, and there are folks who spread compost wait 30 days then plant. It really depends on your personal bacteria tolerance. If you are worried about e-coli and other nasties, you will want to read up on the correct number of days to cook the pile, then the number of days to plant or harvest after spreading. There's a science to it that is simply fastenating!

I personally am a 3rd generation of "spread and plant" gardeners. My grandfather used to throw pumpkin seeds in the raw horsemanure pile, we always had pumpkins as kids. My personal preference is to spread, till and wait for a week in case the soil heats up to plant. My flower beds get an inch of compost whenever I get the energy to spread it, and I've never lost a plant that way.

Organic Gardening magazine's website has lots of information on compost, and I'm pretty sure that if you run a search on compost here you will come up with a lot of really excellent information.

Here is a link that might be useful: A link to Organic Gardening

I have horses, and pick manure piles out of the pasture each fall to spread in perennial and shrub beds, and on the vegetable patch. I don't compost, don't have lots of weeds either.

I personally wouldn't spread horse manure from an 'unknown source' on my gardens. Some horses are kept on daily wormers and feedthrough chemicals that kill fly larvae in the manure, wouldn't want to spread that on my vegetable garden especially, and would be concerned about negative effects on earthworms and 'good bugs' in the flowerbeds as well. Different story if you know your source :)

I have two pastures, and keep the horses in the smaller pasture for two weeks after deworming, so the manure in the larger pasture is less likely to be contaminated.

Thanks for your responses:)

Melee, excellent point about knowing your source, I will check mine and ask if she worms etc.? My gut feeling is she does the minimum w/chemicals since she is a homesteader and uses the stuff for her own gardens but I will check. I would also imagine after composting a bit it would break down the trace chemicals if there were some?

Ms Kitty, you are so right about the science of composting, thanks for the link, I look forward to checking it out. To be honest I went over the the composting/soil forum and got my brain overloaded with more science than I could take...thought you folks would make it more simple. I have never been very successful at composting. I hope to change that this year since I have poultry and will have horse manure.

Thanks again,
Sheila

The folks in Soil are true experts!

One thing that I think horse manure is lacking in is phosphorus which is found in bone meal. I started using bone meal along with the compost year before last, and had better results with tomatoes. They had been purple and not setting fruit.

I have a bunch of old books from organic gardening, from when I started reading up on gardening. Mine is from 1978.
Yeah, here it is:
Horse manure: 14.9 Nitrogen, 4.5 Phosphate and 13.2 potash.
Bone meal is: 4 Nitrogen, 21 Phosphate and .20 potash.
Wood ashes are: 7 potash.
Poultry manure is: 29.9 nitrogen, 14.3 phosphate, and 7 potash.

We got our soil tested, and found that all we needed was the nitrogen and the phosphate. We should be able to grow ANYTHING. I put wood ashes in the stalls instead of lime which may kick up my potash count a little.

If you get your soil tested (which is free around here) you will know what it needs. Hope this helps without overloading.

Kitty

What is the best way to compost manure? For those of you who have livestock what is your method? do you separate the manure piles by breed? goat, cow, horse, poultry etc? or do you pile it all together?

Pile it all together if it's easy to do. If you have some out in the pasture, then send the chickens out to scratch it apart. They will find all the parasite and fly eggs for you. If you winter your animals in a pen, spread a bag of whole corn every week and let them trample it in. At the end of the winter you can turn a hog into the smashed down manure and that hog will turn your mess into a fluffy pile as it goes after all that corn.

I have been told that poultry manure should compost 1 year before turning in the soil? is this the same with horse etc?

You can use any manure compost when it smells as fresh as a forest floor after a rainstorm.

What is the best manure for the garden?

The one you have is best. If you wanted to try to make the best one, it would be the one with the most diversity of microbes at the end of the composting cycle. You need a microscope and some training to figure that out. You can get a good compost by mixing as many different kinds of "feedstuffs" as you can find. That would include all the different animal dungs as well as regular food and plant life. The entire purpose of composting is to kill the pathogenic microbes (the ones that cause disease) and to create a pile of beneficial microbes. Generally pathogens smell bad and beneficials smell good. God gave us a nose to figure out what to steer away from and where to go.

I recently was offered some horse manure and was wondering how to go about using it in the veggie garden.

Compost it first. If it smells bad it needs to compost. You can take anything that smells bad and cover it up with dry leaves and the dry leaves will absorb the smells for you. Keep the pile moist and it will compost the most quickly.

We use Goat manure in a compost pile, In the winter we pile it up, then in the spring we put a black trap on it, then the fall we have really cooked manure. we put it on the garden and till it in. You can also put the goat manure right on the garden in the summer to, it will not burn.
Sandie

Excellent information, thanks :)