Well, the pile isn't mine to cover (it's in the yard of the rabbit-keeper), but once I get some of the manure in my possession, I can keep it covered.

I hoped to hear exactly what you said about the urine providing enough nitrogen to help with the decomposition of the wood pellets. Thanks.

I think you will get a really good result. I used to keep mine in a covered garbage can. Maybe you could pick one up and leave it with the rabbit keeper to use to store it? Just a thought. Enjoy! Rabbit pellets turn the soil a nice black and crumbly consistancy. Enjoy!

Ron
The Garden Guy
http://www.thegardenguy.org
"Read articles & journal entries"

Rabbit manure, even that mixed with wood pellets would be a good nutrient source, but like all manures it should be properly composted before being applied to the garden. An article in the current issue of Organic Gardening magazine will tell you that manure should be aged at least 12 months before being applied to your garden, but simply allowing any manure to sit around for that long means a major loss of nutrients while mixed in with vegetative waste in a compsot pile will stabilize the more volatile nutrients keeping them for plant use. Simply piling manure up and covering it is not a good option either.

Rabbit manure is one of the few animal manures that requires no composting. It is ready to use directly from the bunny! I've raised rabbits for years for espressly this purpose (well....they're pretty fun little pets, also:-)). If it sits for a while it composts naturally, particularly if there is bedding litter combined with it - in fact, this is a pretty much an ideal combo of browns and greens. The loss of nutrients by aging or static composting is minimal. No organic matter or animal manure is a high nutrient source regardless of the processing it does or doesn't goes through - that's just the nature of the material. But it does provide significant benefits to the garden.

Because I have dogs who find the stuff fascinating (and apparently delicious), I work it into the soil around most plants rather than using it as a mulch or topdressing. I then top it all off with a mulch as well.

You're lucky you have liberal access to such a great product. Once you see how well it works in the garden, you may be inclined to have your own bunnies!

gardengal48 is 100% correct. It does not need to be composted, and composting will only serve to lose vital nutrients. Like gardengal48, I also raised rabbits in the past and used the fresh manure for years and never had a problem, especially if you turn it in a couple of weeks before planting. Other barnyard manure is a different story!

I used to raise the bunnies for meat, and they tasted almost like chicken. Since I also raised chickens, I thought, DUH! Why am I also raising rabbits. Just eat the chickens! :-)

Ron
The Garden Guy
http://www.thegardenguy.org
"Read articles & journal entries"

I'm sorry....eating the bunnies is just taking it too far. They are just too cute for that! I couldn't even do that with chickens......eating something you knew personally in its live form, covered in fur or feathers, is impossible for me. I know, I'd make a lousy pioneer or survivalist. Prolly starve to death!

PS. I did taste rabbit once, at a very upscale Italian restaurant. Was very bland and didn't taste like any chicken I've ever encountered.

For very good reasons the national organic standards strongly advise against putting "fresh" manure on soils where vegetables meant for human consumption will be grown. Simply because my grandparents did this with no apparent harm is not a good reason for me to, given that my grandparents probably did not know about the potential diseases they could get, and probably did, from that manure. Because my grandparents mode of transporation was mostly horse driven does that mean I should only use horses to get around?
Perhaps this, from Michigan State University, can be of some help undersanding the why of not applying fresh manure to gardens.

Here is a link that might be useful: Why not manure?

Ok, I am going to hijack this thread rather than start another, I hope no one minds. I have a manure and kitchen/garden waste compost pile. I last put fresh droppings from the rabbits in the pile on 3/18 and added some fairly well decomposed leaves (in trash bags for to years) when I turned the pile last weekend. The pile has been accumulating for a while and I would like to use some of it this year.

The "rabbit droppings" are the animal excrement including urine, any discarded hay and straw, any vegetable matter they don't eat, any pellets they don't eat. These are collected in galvanized pans lined with grain sacks and dumped into my pile as needed. (The sacks are removed from the pile and are used for ease of cleaning the pans and left to be washed by rain and re-used.) The hay is mostly orchard grass, though sometimes they get a bit of alfalfa.

I would like to use this as a fertilizer when I plant this year. I am not planning on tilling and wanted to know if I could use this as a top dressing/mulch with the straw/hay in still recognizable form? Can I just get a shovel full of this stuff and put it in the hole when I transfer my seedlings? I was also wondering if there is a way to get this to compost faster. It does not seem to be moving all that fast.

I should mention I have probably 1+ years worth of material in it and it is made by taking garden fencing and making a "D" shape against a chain-link fence.

Since my original posting, I've been happily using rabbit manure in various ways. My soil is vastly improved.

If you're going to use it as a top-dressing or a mulch, I'd say to go ahead and use it as-is. You may get a bunch of hay growing in your garden from the seeds, but I've found it quite easy to pull out. It will break down nicely, probably by the end of the season.

I've been working manure into the soil when I can, but this year we had a late Spring, and there wasn't enough time between when the soil could be worked and when I wanted to plant seeds...so this year, it's top-dressing for me, all around. I'm going to mix the manure with shredded leaves, and use it as a mulch, and I expect good success.

I am concerned about seed heads from the straw and orchard grass hay... I assume alfalfa will sprout here but my understanding is that most of it is grown in the midwest/Canada. I really didn't want to till my main bed this year which is basically 3 40' mounds and I'm going back and forth between tilling and reforming the mounds and just mixing in the rabbit manure with the soil when i plant and top dressing. I've also been told by the weeder of the household that we will be putting the weedblock sheeting down this year if that makes any difference.

Well, it depends on whether the manure was hot-composted or not. The heat should kill most of the seeds...but if it composted more slowly, or if it's fresh, then yes, you will get seeds in quantity.

The manure I get has timothy hay in it rather than alfalfa. Yes, I get a lot of grass (proto-hay?) coming up, and I need to get rid of it with a hoe or something. I put up with it, because my soil is absolutely amazing since I started using the manure.

Proto-hay works for me. I just have it in a big pile so I don't know if it was hot composted. Most likely not since I got volunteers last spring/summer.

So from kimmsr's Michigan link, it seems we can safely use rabbit manure as long as it's applied 90 days before we harvest anything edible where we put it. Makes sense to play it safe with food. I also kept a rabbit--for his great personality & his droppings--and put the bedding & manure right into the garden, but not on leafy food crops like spinach. Only on things like strawberries or tomatoes, where I mulch on top with leaves. Works great! In a rabbits-as-pets book, I read that rabbits eat their own poop up to three times (through the bunny) because so much of the nutrients are left behind (no pun intended. really!)

I grabbed my whole pile and I'm using it as a top dressing with grass clipings on top of weed block. This was not the most ideal way to go about it, but that is when the weed block down. I plant in raised hills so I know I'm going to have some runoff into the troughs, but with the grass and weedblock it should time release for the summer.

leira, sounds like your rabbit manure is really high quality. Some lady was advertizing rabbit manure on Craigslist and I got some. Besides the rabbit manure I found a piece of a radio, broken glass, other plastic, lots of twigs, and worst of all the bones and pelt of a rabbit that must have died and been thrown in with the manure.
She also had some free range chickens living under terrible conditions, the bottom of their coop had an inch thick wet layer of chicken manure crawling with maggots, their drinking water was the color of muddy water, and to get into the coop you had to step through a puddle of muddy water.

Yeah, mine comes from a foster home for shelter rabbits. I mostly just get manure and litter, without much else. There's a volunteer squash growing in the pile, though. I think the woman who fosters the rabbits occasionally tosses kitchen scraps on the pile, too.

This year there are some pieces of plastic bag that are supposed to be compostable, but aren't really. The woman apologized for that, but I can't blame her -- I tried the same bags myself when my mother-in-law gave us some along with a fancy also-not-very-useful compost crock for our countertop. You live and learn, I guess. Mostly I pick the bags out, but they probably really will break down eventually.

"a fancy also-not-very-useful compost crock for our countertop."

I have one of those & find it quite useful! It gets used paper towels, coffee grounds w/filter, fruit peels, egg shells, veggie trimmings, etc. Then it goes to the compost barrel!

I use those produce plastic bags in mine to keep from cleaning it all the time. And the charcoal filters aren't necessary, just a folded paper towel stuffed in the lid works fine.

there is only one way of composting for me thats anaerobicly
that is without air ,rabbit manure quickly reduces in volume even with hay,paper,and vegtable waste included .
make up a box 4x4x4 or larger ,line the box with black pollythene add your ingredients then cover with more black sheet pollythene add a lump of old carpet on top i bet you cant fill it .

I'm wondering if you can put fresh (organic ) rabbit poop around spinnage? My spinnage has started to yellow and I have checked the roots they're fine. I figured it might need some fertilizer?

You can......won't hurt the spinach at all and very likely sufficient N to green things up nicely. But there are valid cautions about applying fresh manures - even rabbit - to an edible crop because of pathogens or parasitic organisms they may contain. It is better to age the manure first, if not compost it prior to application.