I have been a bit silly . I collect horse dung when the horses past my house I put it straight on my roses. Mentioned it to my dad and he said I was doing it wrong as it will be to strong straight away le it rot or add water and use as a liquid feed .
I was going to ask how long should I wait before I can use horse manure? I'm lucky that we have a lot of small stables around here that bag it up as the collect it off the fields then leave it by the gate for anyone for free.
All they ask is that you return the bags and any spare ones you might have.
If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.
I don't use it as a dressing around established plants until it is all black and crumbly. The fresh stuff is giving off tons of ammonia which will scorch leaves and even kill the plant. (Guess how I know? )
One way is to buy those plastic compost bins that look like Darleks and fill them up with all the fresh stuff as you can get it, then let it rot right down.
If it is a dressing in the autumn for the following spring, you can put it on a bit fresher as it will calm down over the winter ready to be dug in.
Jason, I was always told that horse poo is fine fresh, its the bedding type manure from stables that has lots of wee therefore ammonia in it which will burn plants.
I find it surprising that anyone needs to buy manure from a garden center. So much available from farms, most of it free I'm sure. Oh dear, how fortunate some of us are!
I find it surprising that anyone needs to buy manure from a garden center. So much available from farms, most of it free I'm sure. Oh dear, how fortunate some of us are!
Not really true - manure at most farms round here is stored in more-or-less liquid form in huge slurry tanks/pits and is spread/sprayed on the land, from a trailer which looks a bit like an oil tanker. This has come about because the way of housing dairy cattle and so on has changed a great deal over the years and large quantities of straw etc are no longer used.
The best opportunity to get the sort of manure people want for use in gardens is probably from livery stables and so on, where lots of (initially) dry bedding material such as straw or wood-shavings are used. The wood-shavings take far longer to decompose/rot down than straw-based stuff.
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I have been a bit silly . I collect horse dung when the horses past my house I put it straight on my roses. Mentioned it to my dad and he said I was doing it wrong as it will be to strong straight away le it rot or add water and use as a liquid feed .
I was going to ask how long should I wait before I can use horse manure? I'm lucky that we have a lot of small stables around here that bag it up as the collect it off the fields then leave it by the gate for anyone for free.
All they ask is that you return the bags and any spare ones you might have.
I don't use it as a dressing around established plants until it is all black and crumbly. The fresh stuff is giving off tons of ammonia which will scorch leaves and even kill the plant. (Guess how I know?
)
One way is to buy those plastic compost bins that look like Darleks and fill them up with all the fresh stuff as you can get it, then let it rot right down.
If it is a dressing in the autumn for the following spring, you can put it on a bit fresher as it will calm down over the winter ready to be dug in.
Jason, I was always told that horse poo is fine fresh, its the bedding type manure from stables that has lots of wee therefore ammonia in it which will burn plants.
I find it surprising that anyone needs to buy manure from a garden center. So much available from farms, most of it free I'm sure. Oh dear, how fortunate some of us are!