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Horse manure is somewhat acidic. It's great mixed 50:50 with existing soil for acid loving plants like azaleas, hollies, rhododendrons, conifers. When it is aged, the microorganisms have already started making all the good stuff available to the roots. It's often called black gold by gardeners.
There is a difference though in what that manure was collected with, which is often a function of the bedding in horse stalls. The best was peat moss was used, but that is rare. Next is straw, and least useful might be sawdust unless there was a high ratio of manure to sawdust. Pure composted manure, like collected from a pasture to keep it clean, is the best but it will need to be used more sparingly unless well composted/aged.
Horse manure is excellent for gardens, but has to be composted first. Veggie scraps from the kitchen go into the compost pile, along with hay, horse manure and chicken poop. The garden got crazy large after I added shovels of rich, black compost to the soil this spring. Black gold, yes it is.
The free manure was an incentive. She thought it would be a good thing to add. But it could have been sort of tongue in cheek. I asked for a truckload and we'll see how it goes. She is very careful about her gardening herself and said she took good care of this.
When I had horses at home, I advertised in our local paper that I had aged manure for gardens for free. OMG . . . the line in front of my driveway - I couldn't believe the response I got. I was told that it needed to be aged, i.e. composted, for 90 days in order to not be too "hot" for garden use. It needs that length of time for the nitrogen to balance out and the seeds to be killed by the heat generated by composting.
People were taking it in cardboard boxes, plastic bags, buckets in cars and by truckloads - basically any way they could. And they started dropping by to see if I had any that was ready. I had to post a sign on my gate when I was out of stock. I had no idea it would be that popular. I never had to worry about manure disposal off the property.
When I boarded my horses out, the boarding stable sold all of its manure to local commercial mushroom growers. So always be sure to give your fresh mushrooms a good washing before you use them.
What do you think about horse manure for plants and flowers? I know a woman who is trying to sell her tiller and added in 2 truckloads of free 6 year old horse manure as an incentive. I have a friend who wants to check out the tiller but doesn't want the horse manure at this time.
One spring my neighbor and I took our small pickups to a farm and each got a bedload of horse manure. It was not superfresh but it was also not superold or composted either. It was probably around 6 -12 months old (my estimate as I used to ride horses years ago and knew my way around a manure pile).
My neighbor, being very strong and industrious, double-dug the manure into his veggie patch then planted on top of it. His veggies grew poorly the whole summer, with many being "burned" from the roots upward. He swore up and down that he would never use horse manure again.
Me, being a lazy, um, I mean efficient, gardener, spread the manure in my veggie patch and flower beds, using it as a top-dressing over the root zones of the plants but keeping it away from the plant stems and leaves. I had the best veggies and flowers that year, by a mile! Yes, there were more weeds, but the increase in bounty and health of the plants completely outweighed the increase in weeds. I definitely consider it to be "black gold"!
We used fresh horse manure. Burned the plants and we got invasive weeds everywhere we used it.
6 year old manure would have been much better.
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