"FarmI" wrote in news:4d0b0456$0$13390$ snipped-for-privacy@news.optusnet.com.au:
True enough, you can buy strilised topsoil and in a week or so there come the weeds through the damn stuff, and out comes the hoe as always.
I wasn't specifically referring to horse manure. Chicken and rabbit manure can be toxic to plants, as can alfalfa meal, or fish emulsion, if not added according to directions.
Manure Chicken Diary cow Horse Steer Rabbit N 1.1 .257 .70 .70 2.4 P .80 .15 .30 .30 1.4 K .50 .25 .60 .40 .60
Manure Sheep Alfalfa Fish Emulsion N .70 3 5 P .30 1 1 K .90 2 1
I wonder how many people here have ever killed anything with any sort of fertiliser? I know I haven't.
Anyone want to put up their hand and tell us if you have and if you did, what did you do?
A long long time ago in a far away land. I put too much lawn fertilizer and roasted my front lawn. However, did it completely KILL it.. No. But I did BURN it badly where it took all Summer to heal.. Yes.
I have also over fertilized my tomatoes one year. Did it KILL the plants.. NO. Did I have nice ripe tomatoes That year... NO. I did have allot of beautiful green vines for my tomatoes and NO fruit.
This was done with commercial fertilizer, not animal manure. However, my little dog poops all over the yard now and where he poops looks nice and green.
Too much alfalfa meal on plants in pots. It just fried them. You could smell the ammonia.
At retail outlets you can see bags of sterilized topsoil stored outdoors, sprouting weeds.
"FarmI" wrote in news:4d0c154f$0$22468$ snipped-for-privacy@news.optusnet.com.au:
I didn't, but my next-door neighbor did.
One spring we both went to a horse farm and loaded up our small pickup beds with manure. The manure was maybe 1-3 months old (my best guess - I used to work with horses).
I spread the manure in my veggie garden, keeping it at least 8 inches away from the base of any plant. Most of it went around the edges and in the paths of the garden. I then covered the paths with fresh straw so I wouldn't be walking in manure. That summer (and the following summer) I had the biggest, healthiest plants ever, giving the most prolific yields ever, and the produce was the best and tastiest that I ever received out of that garden.
Meanwhile, my neighbor, using the same manure forked from the same pile, spread it at the base of all his plants. In another part of his garden where he had not yet planted anything, he tilled the manure into the soil and then a week or so later put in more plants. That summer he lost more than half the garden. The plants growing in the tilled area died first, rather quickly, within a month or so. The plants that had manure at their base struggled the entire summer to live, either producing very little or nothing, and then died a long drawn-out death.
Dee
Sounds right.
This is entirely at odds with my experience. I cannot picture 1-3 month old horse manure doing this. Once it has rotted for a few months you can plant straight into it, I have a very vigorous self-seeded pumpkin growing in the manure pile right now. I would say the neighbour added something else (like a chemfert) and didn't tell you.
David
:-))) Would you trust any 'soil' that didn't sprout something or other when given half a chance.?
It amuses me that weed seeds make it through the sterilization process, muscle their way throught the holes in the bags and continue to grow along quite happily throughout the season.
With that said, I don't trust any soil that wasn't made right here.
I have no trust for anything but organic manure produced on organic farms. -- The Aminopyralid issue has not gone away and I'm unwilling to risk contaminating our organic garden with it.
stored
I've always hoped that the half lives of most contaminates are short. All the talk of organic pesticides in non-organic terms I thought of as malathion or seven breaks down in about 20 years. Mere pittance in time compared to TEL or Strodium 90.
Anyway
Happy Solstice! Seems the eclipse and solstice occurs about every 500 years.
................ Rare Cosmic Event to Transpire Tuesday Morning
BTW here is what it may look like.
"David Hare-Scott" wrote in news:iej81h$fa2$ snipped-for-privacy@news.albasani.net:
I could not imagine that he added chemferts. He is *very* (as in,
*extremely*) organic. He has gardened organically for over 30 years.I think it's more likely that I was probably wrong about how aged the manure was. It had broken down very little in the pile, and we were forking from the top (therefore from more recent additions). Apparently the manure was fresh enough to burn and kill the roots of new transplants.
Dee
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