# Whoooohoooo! Manure!!



## AfleetAlex (Nov 8, 2013)

Super excited. This summer I moved out to Williston, ND for work (3 weeks on, one week back home in Minnesota). I found a fantastic spot of land to rent for my camper (yea, we live in campers out here; because renting an apartment is upwards of $2000 a month. Yea, oil boom). My landlord gave me a large plot of land, over the sewer drainage, to build a garden. I spent the entire summer working long days in the sun, cutting fresh alfalfa from a nearby abandoned hay field, and laying it the plot. Next came the 20 bales of seasoned straw the landlord had laying around, and now... **drum roll please** I made friends with the cattle farmer next door and he's bringing me as much old manure as I can use! I'm laying it in in; we're plowing it under, then raking it into rows and covering it in woodchips! We're laying cardboard in between the rows for weed prevention.

I think I should get enough yield off of next years harvest to put up at least 6months more worth of food for my team.

UNBELIEVABLY excited for spring!!!

Land before:









After laying in alfalfa/straw









First load of manure!


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## Sentry18 (Aug 5, 2012)

That sounds like a bunch of crap. Literally.


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## kyredneck (Aug 12, 2012)

Good for you! With all that rich organic matter you should be able to grow just about anything, even in drought conditions.

My only concern is how 'weed seedy' the cow manure is; in my experience it is particularly bad in that area if it has not gone through a sufficient heat to kill the seeds. 

One year (when I first began to garden) I seized the opportunity to clean out some stalls from an old abandoned dairy barn, it was 'aged' manure, black and rich, but MY OH MY!! I might as well direct sowed a fifty lb bag of every imaginable weed seed in the world in my garden. It took years to get those things under control. Hope you don't have that problem. 

I later gained access to a horse barn down the road and would clean a stall or two for the manure, but I would always first build it into a pile in layers, wetting it down as I layered, and cover it tightly with plastic and let it go through heat; took about three weeks, it would get so hot you could hardly lay your hand on it, but it transformed (read composted) the manure, and killed the seeds, and the smell of ammonia was strong in it too, and it would grow anything.

Well, I had the same opportunity last Christmas, I cleaned a stall for the manure and composted it and this year's garden was outstanding.

Dung heap in progress, Christmas 2012:


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## Wellrounded (Sep 25, 2011)

I know how you feel, poo = gold here. Our soils are so bad I get every bit of poo I can. Yep we bring in a lot of weeds but honestly I don't care, we pull them and compost them. Every bit of rubbish (weeds, poo, straw, rubbish hay, etc) I can get my hands on goes to improve this soil. I'd use 10 times as much if I had a frontend loader and could save my back.


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## Tirediron (Jul 12, 2010)

kyredneck said:


> Good for you! With all that rich organic matter you should be able to grow just about anything, even in drought conditions.
> 
> My only concern is how 'weed seedy' the cow manure is; in my experience it is particularly bad in that area if it has not gone through a sufficient heat to kill the seeds.
> 
> ...


Interesting method, How thick did you make your layers??


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## kyredneck (Aug 12, 2012)

Tirediron said:


> Interesting method....


It's an established method, strictly anaerobic, as described in Rodale's 'Guide To Composting'.



> How thick did you make your layers??


Probably 3"-6"; as long as the manure gets a good soaking as you go along, that's what matters.

I might add that horse manure, IF it hasn't already gone through 'heat' or hasn't been exposed to the elements, works particularly well with this method as opposed to cow manure because of it's higher nitrogen content it more readily 'takes off'. Cow manure can be slow and sometimes require the addition of extra nitrogen to jump start the anaerobic composting process.


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