Woodyoak is correct about weed seeds in horse manure, but the way I use it is to put it down and then immediately cover with cardboard/newspapers and several inches of mulch to prevent the weed seeds from sprouting. I just move aside the mulch and cut a hole in the cardboard or newspaper when it's time to plant.

I also don't use manure where my peppers will be since it tends to create leaves at the expense of fruit for the peppers.

how thick are you thinking of shoveling it on ???

and what effect does ground freeze and normal snowload make.. those of you who do it??

would it matter what they feed the horses.. or are the seeds more a pasture issue ...

mx .. i saw some real old post.. maybe one of the tool posts ... you made some comment that hubby had no inclination to doing anything in the yard .. or some such ... boy has time changed him ... ;)

i once got some fresh sheep poop ... threw it all over the yard ... the next year..
EVERYTHING was 2 to 3 times larger than expectations ... lol .. but boy.. did it improve the soil forever .. structure i mean ...

ken

ken - a key difference between horse manure and cow or sheep manure is that horses are not ruminants so more weed seeds will survive the digestion process.... Hay almost always contains lots of weed seeds - and grass seeds! Hay is often very similar to pasture - just grown long :-) There is usually lots of couchgrass in pastures and may well be lots in hay too - you don't want to be adding too many of those seeds to your garden!

Weed seeds....... I agree with woodyoak. I used it one year on my beds, it was years old. NEVER AGAIN lol. I like NHBabs idea:)

so many questions.. so little time.. thx for answering my ... most likely.. obvious questions ...

if you had enough space ... could you leave fallow???? part of the veg garden ... slather on the stuff this fall .... and just till that row or two ... every few weeks next season ... to let all the seed sprout ... and then rotate that row the next season.. etc???

that works in soil renovation and crop rotation ....

victory garden once convinced me to plant a green manure ... SO I SEEDED IN what was basically grass like weeds into my veg bed .. that ended up being a nightmare.. and one of the reason i quit watching that old hippy ... lol

ken

Horse manure brings this story to my mind. I had a grape vine that wouldn't break dormancy. An old gardener I knew told me to get some horse manure((fresh) and pile it on. Worked!! My Dad used to dig it in to the bottom of hot beds when he made a new one.

what are hot beds??? .. what did he grow in them???.. ken

Using horse manure for a hot bed makes sense as there would be enough undigested material in it to heat up the compost nicely. That's probably partly why I've never seen horse manure for sale as a bagged product - too much risk of it heating up in the bag...? Flowergirl - my grandfather used to do something similar re hot bed. He had a row of cold frames along the back of the horse barn. He would add horse manure and start leaf lettuce in them in March.

Never thought of the weeds, was more concerned about burning the transplants/seedlings. Well, I don't know if it could be worse than DH tilling in couchgrass (quackgrass) - !!. Actually, the horses don't eat hay during the summer, they're on pastureland - they're probably ingesting some seeds, but not as much as are probably present in hay. They also get fed a mixture of oats and sweet feed twice a day -- would these cause seeds in the manure? (I feel so ignorant even asking that...)

that is why i am doing my perry mason on cross examination ... plus learning myself ..

still dont understand what a hot bed is ...

ken

I am not sure how much weed seeds the horses would ingest, but I would think you would still want to try and get the manure composted well enough before planting. That way you can avoid as much eventual weed pulling as possible, lol. IMO, I think if you apply the manure the way you stated above, that it would not burn the plants you grow next year. I have been looking online and found this article interesting. It gives a little info on quite a few things regarding horse manure as compost. And there are a ton more online that may be more helpful too.

http://homeguides.sfgate.com/long-wait-before-using-horse-manure-garden-71634.html

mxk3 - undigested oat grains could possibly sprout in the garden - but they are annuals so would only be a short-term problem. If the sweet feed is pelleted, the grains in it are unlikely to be viable; if it is not pelleted, then there could be viable seeds - but they'd be annuals so, once again , not a long term problem. If the horses are mainly outdoors all summer, presumably there is little manure collecting somewhere that could be used in the garden, so I assume it would be winter, hay-fed production we're talking about....? So the weed seed issue would be relevant for that. Be careful if the horses are only getting lush pasture, oats and sweet feed in the summer. That could be a recipe for founder (a very nasty problem with their feet). You might want to talk to your equine vet to see if their summer diet has enough roughage.

ken - my understanding of hot beds is that they deliberately use/create heat in the soil by, in effect, making a sort of compost heap and planting into it when it is hot. So it can be used to create a longer growing season by making warm soil when it is still cold outside. That's what Grandpa was doing with the lettuce beds behind the horse barn and what the old gardener flowergirl talked about was suggesting to help bring her grapevine out of dormancy. Because horse manure contains a reasonably high level of undigested organic matter, it would heat up faster than other types of manures because there is more material available to be broken down quickly. I think in the 1700-1800s hot beds were used to grow things like pineapples as novelties in northern British and European gardens.

ken - showgirl and I were posting at the same tmie - in the link she posted, there is an explanation of a hot bed.