Every year I drag about 3 cubic yards of fresh horse manure to my house. My experience has been that this reduces to something closer to 1 cubic yard than 1.5 cubic yards, more than 50% shrinkage. Loading/unloading 3 yards in 3 different trips every year is not a trivial amount of work. I do use about a cubic yard a year.
Well, it looks like this year I lucked out. There is a horse place willing to deliver 10 cubic yards of cured manure for $200. Just considering that cured means twice the amount I would get out of fresh, no effort on my part, this should cover my manure needs for the next 10 years.
Thatās the nice thing about horse manure. It doesnāt smell much fresh, and after a month it doesnāt smell much at all. Being a year~two old is more dirt than manure.
I hauled 20 tons of leaf compost from the local city recycling a few years ago. They have a big tumbling and crushing machine that turns leaves into this stuff that looks like snuff.
I have hauled more than 30 tons of horse manure from a local stable that has show horses that are fed hay and feed not grazed. All stable cleanings.
I have hauled more than 50 tons of woodchips.
I think i get more bang for my buck from woodchips as everything i dress does very well. Its free and the chippers want rid of itā¦ its a burden to them. No real threat of weed or grasses seeds either.
I have my woodchip piles in 3 locations and they are worm magnetsā¦ within a month the worms make their way from the ground into the pilesā¦and if i wait long enough they will shrink the pilesā¦ but then there is the worm castingsā¦āblack goldā. So i think thats a plus. Perhaps that is why my things do so well with woodchipsā¦ the black gold effect?
I think im done with manureā¦ at least what ive been using. Maybe there is too much sawdust in mineā¦
I keep one woodchip pile separate near my orchardā¦ for my own personal enjoymentā¦ Its a lizard breeding ground. The bugs and stuff that go in there to live attract lizards and they make nests in itā¦ i also found some blacksnakes going in and out of it searching for preyā¦ so its kind of like its own ecosystem for predators and prey. I have noticed a few birds digging around for worms and insects also. Probably too weird for most folks but i enjoy it.
A local place tried to get rid of their manure for free and nobody wanted itā¦ so another guy took it all to their place and is bagging it in feed sacks and selling itā¦ and he is thriving. People love to pay for the bags of manure.
I highly doubt that i could sell bags of woodchipsā¦ the local box stores have thousands of pallets of colored ground stumps for $2 a bag and folks are buying it like hotcakes.
I use wood chips. Mostly because itās readily available. Face it: That has to be the main consideration right?
By mixing in this and that you can easily turn the end product into potting soil, so thatās a plus over say, chicken manure.
Getting it to fire off into aāhotā pile of decomposing stuff would be a challenge if I were organic, which I am not.
They now charge $6 a pickup load at the transfer station and the mountains of it that they used to have are gone. Someone has figured out how to monetize it.
Depends where you get it from, garbage-in-garbage-out and all that. My usual haul comes from a horse boarding house and it seems those horses eat extremely well, I never had issues with weeds.
Chicken manure is absolutely awesome if you are mixing, the extra nitrogen helps break down high carbon items. If you are single-item composting horse works a lot better. It is pretty close to ideal from the word go, it is a lot cleaner to work with, and it is not a smelly mess like chicken manure. I can put down a fresh cubic yard pile and the place smells like a regular horse farm, not nessesarily unpleasant. After about a week the smell is gone.
The other bit is that I love it for the volume. Low nitrogen works best for me. My soil usually wins most āworst soilsā arguments (50% river rocks, 30% river gravel, 20% sand, 0% organic). For trees, I dig gigantic holes where the only thing I can keep is the sand. Well-cured horse compost/sand makes them very happy, topped off every year with more compost and 4 inches of green mulch.
I bought a nice load of mushroom compost from our local coop last springā¦ main components were horse manure and wheat straw.
Good stuffā¦ almost all gone now
A couple years agoā¦ got a nice pile of wood chips from a local county hwy crew clearing brush from the roadsidesā¦
Again good stuffā¦ almost all gone now.
Early this spring got a nice load of new chips when my neighbor had his douglas pear trees topped.
This spring all new and existing fruit trees got a layer of mushroom compostā¦ topped with a layer of old mostly composted wood chipsā¦ toped with a layer of fresh wood chips.
In addition to horse manure, I get and use a lot of green mulch. The tree service down the road has a large pile for free. I mulch with it twice a year; early spring and in the fall. In the spring I mix whatever is left over from the previous fall (not much) with fresh compost and top it off with 4 inches of green mulch. By the fall that breaks down so I I top it off with another 4 inches of green mulch. Green composting in-situ promotes a very healthy soil biota.
My neighbor has a horse (and she agreed and wants it gone) so I will be doing Berkeley composting with the manure; all those Amazon boxes suddenly become more important (I need browns)
Starting tomorrow and just ordered a reotemp 24ā
You have to kindly ask when they use dewormer (ivermectin) since that should be treated differently and does their hay have persistent herbicides for thistle (herās doesnāt)
When I lived in Florida (2015-2021) there were alot of riding stables in our neighborhood.
I knew a guy that had a business hauling clean sawdust to stables and then hauling the soiled sawdust away.
At any point in time, I could call him and he would drop off as many loads as i needed for free.
It was a real nice connection to have. He would drop off 5- 7yrd. loads, i would keep it worked up with the tractor bucket and let it cook for 6 months. Then spread it out on the sandy yard and call him up for another 5 loads.
Honestly you donāt need to add anything to it, right off the horse it has a very good nitrogen/carbon ratio. For the Berkeley method, you would go in the wrong direction if you add carbon; if anything you would want to add more nitrogen. Specially if the manure comes with bedding with is usually extremely high in carbon.
Horse manure without bedding is around 25:1 nitrogen to carbon ratio. A bid of bedding can put that closer to 20:1. The Berkeley method asks for 25~35:1 ratio.