MANURE!

I have read many many things about using chicken and pig manure on your garden, none of which seem to agree with one another.

For example, I've read:

1. Never use chicken manure on your garden when it's fresh, because it's too green.

2. Never use chicken manure on your garden when it's composted or green, because of disease.

3. Use fresh chicken manure on your garden mixed up in tea.

4. Composted chicken manure makes great fertilizer.

5. Use fresh pig manure on your garden and things will grow better.

6. Never EVER use pig manure, fresh or composted, because of disease.

So what's the deal? I have a LOT of free potential fertilizer sitting around my property, and with the price of a bag of 13-13-13, I'd like to take advantage of the free stuff. Can I use it or not? I put all my chicken litter in the compost heap, but now I wonder if I'm going to die of some exotic chicken disease when my garden starts bearing.

What's the poop on using these manures in my garden?


My thread title makes me think of this guy:

Fred,

I spread it on the garden in the fall, then till it in in the spring.

Gives a chance for any nasty bacteria to rot, compost, and die before I grow anything in there that we eat.

If you compost it first off by itself, all the better.

If you have healthy chickens and pigs, don't worry about disease. Just compost it and use it.

Cardinal said:

If you have healthy chickens and pigs, don't worry about disease. Just compost it and use it.

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Ditto. And while you are at it, read the Humanure Handbook, which is available on-line. No, I'm not recommending you put human manure on your garden, but he has a lot to say about composting and using manures that applies to animal manure.

Kathleen

Freeholder said:

Ditto. And while you are at it, read the Humanure Handbook, which is available on-line. No, I'm not recommending you put human manure on your garden, but he has a lot to say about composting and using manures that applies to animal manure.

Kathleen

Click to expand...

About human manure.............when the septic trucks come to clean out the septic tanks that are full of human manure guess were they spray the stuff??

yep....out on the fields....they say the sun cleans it up...then they till it in and plant!!

I was surprised when I was told this.....I guess I never really gave it much thought, but I asked one guy after seeing a septic truck out in a field near us .

teadrinker

Fresh, new chicken manure (and probably hog manure, although I don't know) is referred to as being too "hot." I think that means acidic or alkalinic, and able to burn small seedlings.

Goat and rabbit manure, being mostly comprised of semi digested green and dry green plants, is OK to use at any stage.

Spreding it out on your land in the fall is probably the best idea.

But, you can make a compost pile: Layer green stuff (like green cut weeds) with fresh manure, and a little soil, and some dry stuff, like chopped shreddings from pruning, and put it all in a hoop you make of 1" x 2" wire.

After 3 months, take the hoop off, set it up right next to where it was, and shovel, fork everything back in. This turns the material, and allows more decomposition.

I've read you can use dog poop but not cat poop.

The thing about disease: All manure, including humans, has a big dose of e-coli in it. You don't want that stuff anywhere near your lettuce, spinach, or what ever green raw stuff you might be picking from the garden.

That's why they say not to use it fresh, but rather compost it. So the other microbes in the soil can devour the e-coli bacteria.

That's why you need to keep the cats out of your lettuce patch.

The big raw spinach e coli flap last year was due to wild pigs accessing the water supply for the spinach. e coli.

So we are talking here about an active transfer of bacteria from the soil to the plant leaves.

Composting allows that bacteria to run its normal course.

Plants don't pick up bacteria in their roots and carry it up to their leaves or other edible parts. Really.

The other thing compost does for your soil is that it is teeming with microfauna....little tiny critters. These bioforms live out their life cycle in the soil. They are eaten by earthworms, for one thing. In the process of their lives, their acids (?) work on the rocks and sand grains in your soil, and release minerals into your soil.

Again: John Jeavon's Books from bountiful gardens.com
Susan ashford's book on saving seeds, and Eliot Coleman on a Four Season Harvest.


And advil or ibuprofen for your back.

Hope this helps!

AGED chicken manure is a GREAT fertilizer.


Fresh chicken manure should NOT be used on vegetables. It has far too much nitrogen, so much so that it can burn the plants. On top of that, there is the disease factor...


Best thing to do is either pile up the manure and let it age at least six months after the last time you add manure to the pile, OR


You can spread the fresh manure on a garden bed that you will not open up for use for at least six months after the last time you add fresh chicken manure to the bed. For alot of people, that means adding manure to the pile no later than Halloween. After Halloween, they switch to loading the fresh stuff on a new bed.


Why Halloween?


Because in this area of the country, Halloween is about six months from when most folks will begin planting the next year's crops. That gives the manure six months to age.


Even then, I would not plant crops like lettuce, or cabbage or greens or strawberries on the bed where I had placed the fresh manure. Not if I was going to use that bed six months later.


Six month old animal manure is OK for food that will not touch the manure loaded ground before it is eaten (for example, tomatoes, bell peppers, etc), but lettuce and spinach and greens touch the ground routinely. So I will not plant any plants that might come in contact with the manure in a bed that has been fertilized with manure until that manure is a full year old.


Well, that's how Barry does things....

CAgdma said:

The thing about disease: All manure, including humans, has a big dose of e-coli in it. You don't want that stuff anywhere near your lettuce, spinach, or what ever green raw stuff you might be picking from the garden.

That's why they say not to use it fresh, but rather compost it. So the other microbes in the soil can devour the e-coli bacteria.

The big raw spinach e coli flap last year was due to wild pigs accessing the water supply for the spinach. e coli.

Click to expand...

The above bears repeating. This is the main reason why fresh manure should not be used on a garden. Always give it a good 6 months of composting/rotting, either by spreading in the fall for a fallow winter, or composting in a separate pile.

I had always thought the reason you don't use fresh manure on the garden is because as it decomposes, so much heat is produced that it burns the plants. And that after it has decomposed enough that it no longer puts off heat, it is ready to use.

I always wash my fresh greens before eating, or anything else from the garden. Even if the manure or dirt never touches the food, it usually is windy enough here for things to not be clean.

Between using only aged manure and washing everything, I don't worry much about the germs in the manure. I also don't know of a better fertiliser than good old composted manure.

YMMV

As we clean out the hen houses, we pile that up to use for next year's garden. The pine shavings don't totally go away, so we have a little mulch in with our compost. We now have a rotating 2-year pile. Last year's litter on one side, and this year's litter on the other.

Having said that, I have been known to use the pine shavings from the brooder boxes as mulch for my flower beds and have never had a problem with the flowers dying.

The "burning" from chicken manure is do to a very high nitrogen content. Some plants, such as corn, are less affected than others. Uncomposted lower nitrogen manure is ok for corn but a big no no for root veggies and leaf veggies.

Windy Ridge

Rabbit is pretty good stuff as well and its great to spread and work into the soil as needed.

As far as using/not using "fresh" manure on the garden... certainly, it's safest to not use it at all on any garden which is growing vegetables which will be used raw/fresh for human consumption.

But... it's been done for centuries, and *as long as your animals aren't being raised feedlot style* (ie: crowded, with very high grain feeding levels/low fiber-forage feed) the chances of the "bad" e. Coli being present are *very* low.

Rabbit manure can be used "straight from the rabbit", so to speak, because (anyone squeamish may not want to read any farther, here)... it's ALREADY been "composted". That is... the rabbit ingests it's fresh manure (straight from the source, as it were), re-digests it, and then excretes the firm, formed "pellets" most think of as "rabbit poop".

Hen manure, *as it comes from the bird, or in the form you'd get from most commercial chicken houses*, is VERY "hot". Which means it's extremely high in nitrogen, and it WILL burn tender plants. However... if you use my "deep bedding" method of chicken housing, what you have in the end is almost literally "compost"... and even better, you lose very little nitrogen that way, because it's under cover (in the chicken house) while it's "composting" and the nitrogen binds to the carbon in the bedding.

We clean out the chicken coops once a year, and I have spread it directly on the garden in spring more than once. We also leave the horse stalls (which they're only in a few hours at night in good weather) to build up a "pack"- combined manure and bedding) and spread that on the garden or corn patch. None of us have ever gotten sick from eating even fresh radishes grown in those gardens... even if we don't wash them first.

I think essentially if you have healthy animals, cared for in human (non-crowded, well bedded) ways, and you use your head just a bit... any "worries" about manure are overkill. Certainly, be cautious... but the world is teeming with "germs" and people with healthy immune systems and healthy diets shake off most infections without ever being aware they were "infected".

Truthfully, I'd worry FAR more about parasites, especially in the warmer areas of the country.

Summerthyme

Summer,

Can you ouline or summarize what goes into your deepbedding technique?

I am about to pull the trigger, and purchase 10 chicks... GULP!!!

jehu... I use leaves in the fall, which work fantastically well (and are very cheap- as in FREE! LOL!)

Basically, the deal is simple: you use a LOT of bedding (when I'm adding fresh dried leaves as they fall off the trees, we literally pile them to the ceiling in the pens. The hens then trample them down, and we add more to the ceiling again. When we're done, in a good year, we may have 2 feet of crumbly, dry leaves in there for a base). But you don't clean the pens... you just keep adding more bedding as needed. With the "leaf method", we often don't have to add much bedding at all. Last year, the leaves were sort of sparse for some reason, so I've been dumping lots of shredded paper in there as well.

As long as you don't get a water leak or some other really wet spill, the birds will simply stir up the bedding (toss some whole grains in there once in awhile if they aren't doing a good job... they'll scratch and stir to get at the grain) and keep everything dry and mixed up.

Then, once a year (maybe twice a year if your birds are crowded, but honestly, I've found you're MUCH better off just adding more bedding if it starts getting damp or stinky... done right, there is almost NO odor in the pens, and even pitching them out is easy and doesn't burn your nose like "normal" chicken pens do) clean it out to the bare floor, and start over adding the deep bedding. We do this in early fall, so it's ready for the new leaves.

As I mentioned, shredded paper (especially the "cross cut" stuff) works pretty well... it's not as "pretty" as plain leaves or chopped straw, but it works, and it's weed free, and it's FREE. Straw will work, but it's much better chopped. Very long, tough straw is difficult to stir up... probably most modern balers break it up pretty well now.

Think creatively about bedding... if you use an old fashioned lawn mower (not a "mulching" mower), leave the grass clippings to dry on the lawn for a few hours, then put the dry clippings in the pen. Sawdust works very well, but is getting difficult to find around here. Basically, anything fairly lightweight, very dry, and absorbant can be used for bedding.

It's hard for some folks who are conditioned to "clean out the pens" weekly or whatever to get used to the idea of NOT cleaning them. Interestingly, it was a book by Louis Bromfield I read when I was a young girl which started this whole idea in my mind... when the world war hit, they lost a large part of their labor force. They had to figure out new ways of farming... and they discovered hens raised on deep bedded packs were actually much healthier and more productive than they were when they were cleaning and scraping out the pens frequently.

One thing: You'll want to get one of those hanging feeders, and you'll need to build some type of "rack" to hold the waterer up above the bedding a bit. The hanging feeders are great because you can adjust them to be the right height no matter how deep the bedding is. The waterer issue can be a PITA, because the hens will scratch the bedding into the waterer, and it will often wick water out into the pen. If it's possible, it's better to keep the water outside in a their run as long as the weather permits. We usually set an old wheel rim in the pen and put the waterer on that. Yes, it's redneck, but it works!

Summerthyme

Redneck WORKS!

Thank you for the input summer.

I have 11 young chickens and have been hesitating to put them out in the coop because of a current lack of bedding.

I am mowing the grass tomorrow and as they are calling for nice weather and I have lots of clippings, anticipate having a partial bed by this weekend!

Leaves huh, I am glad now that I am putting their pen under the maple tree!!!

I did the same deep bedding process as Summertime when I had chickens. I hung the water font from a chain to raise and lower as needed. Worked well.