So I got a load and I mean a LOAD of wood chips delivered to me this morning from my most frequent tree service buddy (the guy who has dropped off the most rounds). No charge to me. It smells absolutely amazing. The leaves and the wood, kind of smells fruity like apples, but my kids says it smells like yogurt for some reason. Anyways, I went off to the horse farm 10 minutes from my house where my kids take riding lessons. I had called up the owner yesterday and had left a message. When we finally spoke he said "So what exactly was your question regarding the horse manure??" He sounded confused.......and I politely asked if it would be alright if I took some and I think I heard him fall off his chair. Turns out he has to pay $350 a *week* to have a 30 yard dumpster emptied and has a backup 30 yard dumpster when the first one is full........so I could see his eyeballs pop out of his head over the phone when he said "You can have as much as you want.......and come as often as you want!!!" So I headed over there after getting the wood chips and he even had two of his workers load up my entire bed with horse manure (has the poop, pee, and bedding hay). I thought it would be nice to give him some firewood cutoffs so I loaded up my bed and dumped into two wheel barrows using the HarborFreight cargo unloader (love that thing!) and also gave him a 44 gallon garbage can full of kindling. He's going to use the wood for his outdoor pit so it's perfect - helping each other get rid of stuff we don't need that the other can use! Came come, unloaded half the manure into one pile, mixed in several garden carts full of wood chips, watered each layer thoroughly, and then tossed the pile as much as I could until I couldn't see any dry spots. The wood chips does a pretty darn good job of masking the smell of the manure. In six months this compost is going to be awesome for my planter box garden bed. It was a beautiful day to be outside. And then I went played tennis for an hour and a half at 2pm.
Yeah this is pretty exciting. I grew corn about dozen corn stalks from seed in the front yard before I got into wood.....and that was fun. Right now I've got some scallions growing as well but next year.......that's when I am hoping I can learn enough to grow a lot of tomatoes and the rest has yet to be determined. I made 4.5 gallons of sauce last week using store bought plum tomatoes and chicken stock I made from scratch that took 12 hours. The sauce took about 7 hours.
A friend of mine has horses and he found a place that sells topsoil. They let it age and mix it in with dirt and sell it. He brings them manure and they give him topsoil.
That will be a great pile of compost. Our neighbor has a small horse farm. They have two piles of manure. They said the aged manure is good, the new stuff has a lot of weed seeds. I may take some aged and mix it with shredded leaves to put over the septic tank where the soil is sparse. I trade maple syrup for horse manure with my neighbor. I think he is getting the better deal.
Trades are awesome. That's how it should be when possible. Wife just saw what I did today. Only thing she asked was "Did you wash your truck afterwards?" and I was like "WHAT DO YOU THINK EH??"
Dang. There were three horse farms on the road I live on. Still hard to get manure. Two have closed and I don’t bother trying anymore. The farmers grab it for the hayfields. Never heard of paying to have it taken away LOL
IMO chicken manure is the bestest. I got some horse manure once in the Fall. It sat in a pile over the Winter but it sure didn't compost much. The weeds sprouting in that pile were awful. Some sprouted in the cold of Winter. You can't stockpile horse or cow manure here over a certain amount you have to have a facility that guarantees no runoff or leaching into the ground. Horse manure is pretty easy to find for free on craigslist.
It's a horse ranch.....so not really a farm....so they have two rings they teach lessons in, a barn to house the horses, a barn to house the hay (that they buy), and a few smaller barns......but not that big of a property.....so there's no fields of corn (or anything else) requiring fertilization. Therefore they need to get rid of it. It's not urban.......but suburban.......and while there is one large, rather famous farm in that area........it's atypical.
After seeing what happened to a large local tomato grower who used horse manure I'm kind of leery of using it. He lost hundreds of plants. This was due to a herbicide that was used to control weeds in the hay/straw. Hate to be a party "pooper" but just a word of caution. Herbicide Carryover in Hay, Manure, Compost, and Grass Clippings | NC State Extension Publications
Just pointing out that even when we had three horse farms nearby demand was so great you couldn’t get it. Personally I don’t know **** about manure. LOL I’ve heard from old timers over the years it’s not good to spread on your fields raw but the guys dealing with all the hay around here are doing it. Maybe because cow manure is non existent in these parts now. FWIW the explanation I got was horses don’t digest their feed well like a cow does. So the seeds of whatever they eat are now spread into the fields. Just from my observation the grass seems ok as long as there’s rain. It seems to grow fast enough to crowd out the weeds. We just had a drought here in Ct after the first cutting and the hay is terrible. They just did the second cutting and I’m not sure if they’ll even bother bailing it. Very little grass came up the second time around, mostly weeds took over. Not my job tho. Just observing.
That's black gold in about a year. I've been getting 2 yards a year for about 7 years now. Best gardens I've ever had.
