Thanks, Hazel. We were just talking about it tonight, GDW and I. Our viewpoint is, we've decided, we're growing our own stuff, without herbicides or pesticides. (Hopefully we're gonna grow it. LOL) Yep, maybe there's some really bad chemical in the deworming meds that is gonna kill us; maybe in the wood chips. But the fact of the matter is we're going to die, sooner or later. . . and look at all the pesticide/herbicide veggies we've bought through the years in the grocery stores. We figure the chicken poop is probably not going to be our life/death deal maker. The chicken poop is going to help the herbicide/pesticide-free plants grow. So we're going to go for it and not worry about it. (Besides, our grandkids are no dummies and also want to do right for their chickens and so have researched best-chicken-growing practices, too.) All we can do is the best that we can do. Right?

I have largely stopped using animal manure in my edible gardens because of all the issues with herbicide carryover. When the class of herbicides that can cause problems can survive the digestive tracts of cows and horses in high enough concentration to kill vegetable plants (which does happen), I wonder what chance those herbicides have of surviving the digestive tract of chickens? We know there was a big issue in one of the northeastern states a few years back where gardens were killed by herbicide residue in a compost product made from composted horse manure. It turned out that the horses were fed a bagged, commercial feed containing herbicide residue. The residue left the horse's bodies in their manure. The manure was composted at a commercial composted facility. The compost was sold and applied to gardens. Gardens died. So, how much risk is anyone willing to take of having that same thing happen to their garden? In my case, my choice is not to take that risk at all. I put all my chicken manure in a compost pile whose compost is used for ornamental plants, but not for edible ones.

I've been working to improve the soil here in our vegetable garden plot since 1999, and with great success. There is absolutely no way I ever will risk harming the plants grown in that soil by using any manure from any animal in those raised beds with highly fertile, highly enriched soil. It just isn't going to happen. I don't want to undo two decades worth of laborious soil improvement.

I've seen people, including someone in my own neighborhood using their own hay, totally destroy their veggie garden by inadvertently introducing herbicide residue via manure, compost or mulch (hay) and I'm determined that never will happen here. Not by my hand.

The good news is that if you contaminate your garden soil with herbicide residue, you'll only be garden-less for maybe 1 to 3 years while you remediate the soil, but I don't want to contemplate one summer without fresh veggies from our own garden, much less 2 or 3 of them, and I would greatly resent having to spend time and money to fix a contamination problem that I caused. It just seems better to avoid doing it in the first place. Your mileage may vary, and your risk tolerance may be higher than mine. It is bad enough to have airborne herbicide drift (from someone else, not from us) kill some of my tomato plants virtually every year. I certainly am not going to risk using a soil amendment that would do the same thing.

Herbicide carryover is real. It kills gardens. Use manure carefully and wisely and, if you are going to use chicken manure in your own compost, do the bioassay tests first to prove to yourself that your compost is clean before you add it to your gardens. The bioassay tests only take a few weeks to conduct and doing them first before you use the compost would at least give you peace of mind that your compost is free of herbicides in any amount large enough to do damage.

Exactly why I don't use any manure. I will use the bunny poo in my ornamental area but I have to wait 120 days if I use it on veggies. Sable is fed organic feed. And veggies.

A lady I was following from Colorado does garden videos. Last year everything started off great raised beds, new compost, beautiful huge tomatoe plants raised indoors, dead all dead from contaminated compost. She had no clue it was even possible. I have not seen her do anything this year, I hope she didn't lose heart. It is such a tough blow.

Nancy, you are getting the chicken poo from your grand kids? I wonder if you could suggest organic feed for them. Or offer to offset the cost difference. If they normally spend $5 a week for chicken food and the organic is $9, you could pay the extra $4? Something like that if their money is tight. Your homegrown food and their chickens are all organic that way.

Speaking of chickens. Mine are pooping in my back garden as I type. AND scratching all the leaves out of the beds. They're probably thinking about sneaking under the fence again.

I"m home today! Love it.

I read a book a while back, The Intelligent Gardener. The author said that years of using wood products in the garden could result in a buildup of potassium. Because we've used sawdust and oak leaves for years I had our garden soil tested. The results showed adequate potassium and very excessive phosphorus and slightly deficient nitrogen. I called the county agent for an explanation. He asked how the garden had been treated. I told him about the oak leaves and sawdust. I also told him about the 30 years we had been cleaning out our chicken pen once a year in the fall and tilling in the litter and pine shavings. For 20 years this has been the litter from 100 meat birds raised for 7 weeks in the spring; we no longer raise layers. He said that was the source of the excess phosphorous and also the source of the high pH--7.5. Grower feed is high in phosphorous and calcium. Why the low nitrogen? I wondered. Because nitrogen is used up or leached out. Phosphorous accumulates. "Your great grandchildren can garden there and not need to add phosphorous." He suggested we stop putting the chicken litter on the garden and spread it on the lawn. I don't know a lot about any other issues but no more litter on the garden for us. We stopped putting wood ashes on the garden over 20 years ago when a test showed too much potassium and a high pH. I guess the takeaway lesson for me is that once in 20 years is not nearly often enough to have a soil test run. So for a few years we were advised to buy nitrogen only fertilizer for our garden. We are still going to use the leaves. Hubby needs to quit tilling so we will be cutting the garden size down and converting the reduced size to BTE.

Although we use commercial feed, we've never had any problems with plants dieing in our garden.

Kim, Considering herbicide carryover has been killing gardens since around 2000 or 2001, it still is not a well-known issue. Most people, even if they have heard of it happening to somebody else someplace else just assume (as we humans tend to do) that it won't happen to them....until it does. I hope the lady in Colorado does not lose heart and does continue to garden. All she has to do (other than remediating her existing soil) is just change how she does a few things. For example, a person could continue using compost, manure and hay brought in from elsewhere as long as they do the bioassay tests first. Adding an extra step is just one more thing to remember to do---and to remember to do in a timely fashion---but it isn't that hard and it isn't that much extra work.

When I stopped getting local manure and hay from our friends who offered it to us on a regular basis, they had a hard time accepting that I didn't want their stuff any longer because they felt it was safe for use. However, even if they don't spray those specific herbicides on their own hay pastures, perhaps their neighbors do and some of the herbicide drifts onto their property, or in drought years, they're using lots of purchased hay and don't know how it was raised, so then their livestock's manure could be contaminated and they would have no idea. I just decided the only way to be 100% sure was to not use anything that came from off our property. It also fits in with my goal of gardening in the most sustainable way I can.

What if.....what if we could only garden with the soil we have on our property amended only by material from our property? Could we do it? My answer now is yes, but I wasn't so convinced when I first starting using only stuff from our property to amend our soil. It sure is a lot more work, and I have to make tons more compost than I did back when I could easily obtain spoiled hay or animal manure from our friends who ranch, but it is doable.

If you've ever had a friend drag you over to their now-sickly garden to diagnose what's wrong, and the first thing you see is herbicide damage on plants that looked great a few days ago, you know the heartbreak that gardener is about to experience. Once you have confirmed herbicide damage, then you can help that person figure out how it happened. There's many ways in which a garden can become contaminated by herbicide but I think the form involving persistent herbicide carryover in mulch, compost or manure is the worst---it is much more long-lived than having plants hit by aerial drift, and the remediation is a lot more complex and time-consuming.

Not only can herbicides contaminate a veggie garden by aerial drift or by herbicide residue carryover in compost, manure or mulch, they also can arrive in a garden in other ways. For example, some pre-emergent herbicides labeled for us with certain veggies (onions, I'm specifically talking about you, lol), and treflan is one example of this, can contaminate soil and damage plants if they were applied at a higher rate than what the label said. Or, some unsuspecting husband can destroy his wife's flower or veggie garden by using a glyphosate nearby that accidentally hits plants it shouldn't. (Hence, my comments that there is no place for use of a herbicide in a gardening area----accidents happen!)

Dorothy, It's odd how a standard garden practice that generally is beneficial can cause some nutrients to build up in garden soil, isn't it? Of course, I've never used wood ash since we started out with high pH soil, and I really don't use a lot of manure because I learned of herbicide carryover in manure, compost and straw not too many years after we moved here. Even then, I slowly stopped using those items---I stopped using manure from off our property first, then stopped using chicken manure in the compost pile used for the edible gardens, and then finally stopped using the straw. I haven't brought in any outside straw (except alfalfa since it can't be treated with those herbicides) since 2010. It has been hard to change over from what once was considered safe and beneficial, but I've done it.

We're not completely no-till yet, but we're getting very close to it. I haven't tilled anything in the front garden this year and don't intend to, but the back garden still is a work in progress and likely will be rototilled before we plant anything back there.

Last week and again today, I spent a lot of time scooping up the compost from our pathways (the compost is last year's pathway mulch now fully decomposed) and putting it on top of the beds. I didn't even work it into the soil. The digging involved in planting will partially carry the compost components down into the soil and rain and earthworms and other soil dwellers will do the rest. However, there are days I still think that I ought to rototill the compost into the soil....but, then, I talk myself out of it and don't do it. I know the soil structure, the soil's microbial life and the earthworms are better off if I don't cultivate the soil mechanically, but change is hard nevertheless.

Years ago, Miracle Grow introduced an organic soil-less mix. I was so excited to think I could just go buy it and use it to fill a container instead of mixing up my own version of Al's 5-1-1. Well, when I opened that bag of the MG Organic, it reeked of chicken manure (in the worst possible way!!) and I went ahead and used it anyway. I flat out ignored the voice in my head warning me not to use it, and I paid for that mistake. Nothing grew, and most things died. Fungi grew on the surface of the containers and the stinking smell never went away. I never have bought the MG Organic again and don't recommend it to anybody for any reason. My attitude nowadays is better safe than sorry.

Oh, and I have to add y'all, that when I'm shoveling that compost out of the pathways into the beds every winter, I always marvel at the miracle that is compost. To think that we just dump chopped up autumn leaves and grass clippings on top of the pathways every year, and in the end, we get beautiful compost, with no turning a pile, no watering of a pile, no worrying about how much greens and how much browns we've added and no filling up wheelbarrows and hauling in compost from a distant compost pile....well, to me, the pathway compost seems like a miracle every single year.

Dawn

Fascinating! I'd already decided to pile the manure separately and add to the compost gradually. I think I will do a bit of bioassay testing. Thanks so much! I am not confident, suddenly, about the prospects of having it be okay. I was worried about the deworming issue; hadn't even thought about the herbicide issue! Wow. Holy mackerel.

I would like to have more trees to make more of my own compost. I already use the clippings from mowing. I know of an area near a friends that is an awesome place for leafy compost. I will probably get a couple 5 gallon buckets full for my herb garden.

Kim

We don't have many trees either, Kim. I'm not sure if neighbors would be okay with me scooping leaves out of their yards or not. I suppose I could ask. I have many bags of leaves from friends in town--those who have to keep a tidy lawn because of HOAs. Do trees have herbicides? Do untreated pine shaving have herbicides?

Seriously, it's getting to the point that we won't be able to bring in bagged dirt or garden ready from places like Minicks because there might be some sort of residue in it. Then, everyone will depend on Monsanto to feed us with their herbicide resistant "food". And they will own our food and they will win. It's depressing.

It is kinda depressing, I agree. . . bummed. Oh dear. . . we have leaves, leaves, leaves. Makes me sad for you guys because most of our neighbors rake their leaves up and burn them. I've been looking for pine shavings but don't know that there's any around here. I'll have to investigate more closely. Also need to go visit a few places in town to see about getting used coffee grounds from them.

Nancy, I tested compost I brought in from the City of Norman. If I remember correctly, I started one group of seeds in seed starter and another group in a combo seed starter and compost (I think it was 2/3's seed starter and 1/3 compost). The seeds all sprouted and grew. The ones in the seed starter only did better, but I wonder if it's because they were in seed starter, which is ideal for seeds. I grew tomatoes last year in a spot where the compost sat for months. They did great. It's probably a good idea to test compost each time before placing it in your garden.

Yep Hazel, thanks to Dawn, I'm going to get on that testing!

I know people (some are members of this forum) who routinely drive around the neighborhood and pick up bags of leaves set out on the curb for trash collection. I don't think there's any danger in doing that, in terms of the leaves being contaminated with anything worrisome. Some members of this forum just have agreements in place where the neighbors give them all their autumn leaves for the compost pile or for mulch and the gardener gives them produce in return in the summer months. There's more than one way to skin a cat. (Don't tell my cats I said that.) Even though we have 10+ acres of woodland, the only leaves we routinely collect are the ones that fall on the lawn. We just run over them with the mower and chop them up, catching them in the grass catcher and dumping them right from the grass catcher to the garden pathways. I could go into the woodland and rake up and collect a lot more, but I remain mindful of the fact that the leaves in the woodland will decompose and feed the woodland soil and then the woodland soil will feed the plants. For a few years, I did collect leaf mold and autumn leaves from the woodland, but always feel guilty when I take stuff out of the woods, so I try to only collect from the yard. Luckily we have planted tons of trees in the yard since moving here and they are big enough now that they drop lots and lots of leaves.

Nancy, Once you get yourself in the mindset that it is better to be safe than sorry, then letting municipal compost age before you use it becomes second nature as does testing stuff before you add it to the garden. The price of being complacent and not testing is that you risk losing at least a year's worth of garden.

Even if you find that compost or hay fails the bioassay test done with peas or beans, that doesn't necessarily mean you cannot use the compost or hay right away. You just have to use it with a crop that is not bothered by the herbicide residue---and that would be corn---any corn---sweet corn, field corn, flour corn, popcorn, etc. or sorghum or something similar. The persistent herbicides that are causing us so much trouble are the ones that are sprayed on hayfields/grassy type crops to kill broadleaved weeds. Those persistent herbicides won't kill your grassy type crops. Just something to keep in mind. Oh, and that's the exact reason that alfalfa hay remains safe to use---alfalfa is a legume, so the problem (problem from a gardener's point of view) herbicides cannot be sprayed on it or it would kill the alfalfa plants and there would be no alfalfa hay. I'd use alfalfa hay a lot except it is very expensive to buy.

No one is responsible for the health and safety of our own gardens except for us. Just us. To steal from the title of my favorite TV show, this is us. No one cares about our gardens like we do. So, we have to shoulder that responsibility ourselves, because the rest of the chemical-using world is going to keep spraying their herbicides and they really don't care if it affects us. At least nowadays the persistent herbicides are labeled as persistent and the users are warned that plants sprayed with them can contaminate manure and compost. In the early days of the persistent herbicide crisis, the farmers using the herbicides was as shocked by their persistence in composted manure, compost, hay and even cattle feed as the gardeners were. Nowadays there is no excuse for a farmer or rancher passing on contaminated manure or hay and claiming they didn't know about the persistence of the herbicide. There's no way they don't know, unless they aren't reading the labels of products applied to their own property.

I am grateful we live surrounded by ranches and not by farms. Anyone who lives close enough to a farm to have herbicide drift from that farm is going to have problems from time to time with herbicide drift a lot more often than those of us who generally only get hit in spring when everyone is either spraying their pastures with those persistent herbicides or spraying their fencelines with either glypohosate, 2-4-D or a combination product containing both. Well, unless someone lucks out and lives by an organic farm, but that would be an incredible stroke of luck.

As hard as it can be to grow organically and in the safest and most sustainable way possible, it really is easier now that it ever has been before. There's a much wider range of organic products available, especially organic fertilizers, than what we had 20 or 30 or more years ago. There's more organic pesticides, though I still use them only minimally. There's barrier methods like micromesh or Biothrips proteknet, and summerweight floating row covers. We just have to stay on top of all the latest developments and perhaps work a bit harder to keep our gardens as happy and as healthy as possible. There were organic remedies I wouldn't touch with a 10-foot-pole decades ago (like rotenone and sabadilla) and there's still current organic remedies I prefer not to use, though they aren't as dangerous as the ones I mentioned.

Remember that just because a product label says it is organic, that doesn't mean it is safe. It only means it is derived from a natural, not synthetic, active ingredient. Even more frustratingly, sometimes manufacturers add a non-safe extra ingredient to an organic product, and I won't use that product because of the added ingredient. Coming from a natural versus synthetic origin does not automatically make a product safe, and that is probably the single most misunderstood thing about organic gardening. For example, take diatomaceous earth--a longtime natural remedy. At one point, a specific manufacturer began adding a chemical pesticide to the bags of DE it produced. So, an unsuspecting person might think they were buying food-grade DE but they were buying a chemical pesticide "enhanced" DE. You always have to read the labels and know what you're getting! Organics are safer in general, but not all meet my own safety standards and not many of them end up in my garden.

Remember that this is YOUR garden. You practically live in it in the summer, and (depending on your circumstances) so do your pets, your native garden helper wildlife like bees and toads, your children, grandchildren, spouses and some pets. It is your environment. Keep it safe. With my garden, except for obvious outside issues like herbicide drift that I cannot control, the buck stops with me. Nothing unsafe is going to make it into my garden unless I allow it to so do, and I don't. Because we all like to strive to grow in the healthiest way possible, we have to be the person who says no sometimes to products that can harm as much as they can help.

I know plenty of people who use all sorts of synthetic chemicals in their gardens on a regular basis and that's their choice. My choice generally is not to use those in mine. You have to decide what matters to you. Some people use synthetic fertilizers and fungicides and are okay with that, but never would use a synthetic herbicide or pesticide. Some use nothing but organics. Some use nothing but synthetics. Some people who never, ever, ever would use a synthetic product of any sort in their garden still refuse to acknowledge the risk involved in bringing in outside manure, compost or hay and that's a sort of Russian roulette they're playing with their otherwise organic garden. They're playing the odds. Sometimes it is an accident---like a rancher who also is a gardener forgets they bought a lot of hay one summer in drought and they forget that the manure in the cattle barn might have herbicide residue in it from that purchased hay and they use that manure in their garden, thereby poisoning their own soil with a product that they don't even use on their own property. It happens. People are human and make mistakes.

Some of us strive to be as organic as possible, but will use a synthetic pesticide, for example, in a worse-case-scenario where organic pesticides repeatedly have failed to halt the pest damage and we are stepping up to the next strongest pesticide, which happens to be synthetic. Never say never but instead focus on using integrated pest management wisely and in a way that fits with your own standards. You never know what a huge invasion by something like blister beetles or grasshoppers might push you into doing. Some day you may have to use a product one time that you normally never would use. Allow yourself to do that if it is the only way to save your garden. I think there's worse things in the world than spraying a synthetic pesticide one time, though I'd never routinely spray one. While it always is my choice to be as organic as possible, I did spray a broad-spectrum pesticide one time (yep, as in one time in my entire life) and the world didn't end. I hated doing it, but it saved my garden. I still hope I never have to do it again.

In the end, we all do what we have to do to feed our gardening addiction. I just hope we all try to be the kind of gardeners who create a garden that is a beautiful, healthy and productive ecosystem, and never forget how many other little living creatures share the garden ecosystem with us. It's not only about the plants. While I don't want to do things that harm the plants, I also don't want to harm everyone else who lives in or passes through the garden---and that includes the birds, lizards, toads, frogs, turtles, skinks, butterflies, hummingbirds, green lacewings, beneficial wasps, earthworms, ground beetles, assassin bugs, etc.

Dawn

Love reading your posts, Dawn.

Thank you.

I'm itching to garden this year as my beds are ready. I've been raking leaves every day for .. dunno how long. I wanted to cover the garden because I don't have enough hay. I even considered breaking down one of the bales on the cold frame, but didn't. Anything... to save moisture.

I noticed leaves aren't that great at holding in moisture. Like, some types of leaves actually suck up as much moisture before containing it. I started piling hay on top of the leaves when I can. That works really well.

The soil LOVES poplar tree leaves, but they break down faster than the pecan and elm leaves.

But wow, the leaves make for fluffy soil!

I used some leaves I got from my son's neighbor last year and lost every tomato plant that I put those leaves around. Lesson 492 learned....

Kim, Do you know why you lost those tomato plants? Had the trees been sprayed with something? Were there black walnut leaves in that batch from your neighbor? As long as the leaves you used weren't sprayed with a herbicide (which seems unlikely) and didn't include black walnut leaves, I cannot imagine how they could harm any plant in a vegetable garden. I've used leaves in my garden since 1999 and never have had them harm my plants. In fact, they have enriched the soil better, more quickly and more cheaply than anything else I've used in the garden other than compost....and my compost piles always contain huge amounts of leaves too. Granted, I use only leaves from our property so I know they haven't been sprayed with anything, and I don't use leaves from the trees along the roadway since the county sometimes sprays herbicides to control weed/grass growth in hard-to-mow areas of the utility easement along county roads.

Leaves are my primary soil builder, but I do run the lawn mower over them and chop them up into smaller pieces before putting them in the garden. That's so they will break down more quickly and feed the earthworms and the soil. If you put whole leaves in your garden, it can take them a year or two to even halfway break down and I don't like the way they pack down solidly when whole. When I clean out my garden in late winter, I rake up and remove the whole leaves that have fallen into the garden from the adjacent woodland and either put those leaves on the compost pile or just pile them up in the yard, run over them with the lawn mower, and return the chopped up bits to the garden as mulch.

You do have to avoid using black walnut leaves because of the juglone, but I don't have any black walnut trees in the yard so that's not a concern for me. My black walnut trees are deeper in the woodland where they belong and where they and their leaves cannot harm my garden.

Whatever happened to your tomato plants, I'm not convinced the leaves had anything to do with it unless they contained juglone or some sort of chemical residue. Leaves in general are an incredible soil builder and not harmful. I owe much of my gardening success to the use of leaves as mulch and in compost as they've helped turn compacted red clay soil suitable for making clay flowerpots into beautiful brown loamy soil that grows highly productive gardens.

Dawn

I never talked to him about it but I figured something they sprayed the lawn with that got raked into the leaves. He tried to keep the lawn meticulous.

I have used many leaves over the few years I have been gardening and this was the only incident. Just know your source and what they have done.

I agree. I don't go collect random leaves for that very reason. It would be so nice to be able to collect leaves all bagged up already, but there's an inherent risk in doing that. I can pretty much tell from looking at someone's yard in winter, spring and summer if they use chemicals by how weed-free they are. Out here in our rural area, no one has weed-free anything unless they're using herbicides. I prefer weedy lawns because what we call weeds generally are native plants that provide food and shelter for the wild creatures as opposed to perfectly manicured, heavily mowed un-naturally green lawns that look like a perfect green carpet and provide no food or shelter for the wild creatures. I'm probably in the minority in that area though.

Roots need air and water. Thick, tough leaves, such as oak leaves, have enough body to allow air to permeate between the fallen leaves. Other types of leaves are not stiff enough, thus they quickly mat down and become impermeable to air and water. Mulching with flimsy leaves will kill your plants even if you water the plants. Flimsy leaves need to be composted and allowed to rot before using as mulch, but stiff leaves, such as oak leaves are no problem being used as mulch and left to rot around your plants.