Looking for feedback here. There is an abundant source of composted manure/black topsoil dirt within 11 miles of my residence. Farm owner says its horse manure thats been spread out 8 years ago over her acreage. Its too soft and too deep for her horses to run on or feed off of. She is in the process of scraping it. 8-10 inches deep is what she is saying. How good is this stuff for growing grass on my yard? She is asking just $5 to use her loader and get it off her farm.

what do you think?

 

That is alot of poo. I am not an expert, but make sure it is disced and allowed to dry on the lot from which it came. I understand if you use cow manure, weeds seeds are present and your inviting more work and $$ to get rid of the weeds. I am not sure about horse manure.

 

Generally speaking, anything grown with horse manure has lots of weeds.
What goes in one end comes out the other in weed seeds.
If this compost is eight years old, that may be diminished somewhat, from the repeated germination over the years, but if it is more recent then you may get lots of weeds.
Fresh horse manure is too strong, and will burn what is planted with it, it needs to be cured, so to speak.
Other than that, horse manure is organic, and is a great fertilizer.

 

Looking for feedback here. There is an abundant source of composted manure/black topsoil dirt within 11 miles of my residence. Farm owner says its horse manure thats been spread out 8 years ago over her acreage. Its too soft and too deep for her horses to run on or feed off of. She is in the process of scraping it. 8-10 inches deep is what she is saying. How good is this stuff for growing grass on my yard? She is asking just $5 to use her loader and get it off her farm.

what do you think?

 

Have heard that it's not that great for fertilizer, BUT does it have good greens growing on it ???

 

Manure that has composted that long should be ok Just disk it in/roto-till it in well.

 

I use the fresh manure out of my jacks enclosure on my garden and have for years. It works great. I also clean out the fresh manure out of the barn and spread it on the pasture. The only result is taller and green grass in the areas where I spread it. You will have weeds though. The fresh manure from my jack makes for a heck of a corn and tomato crop every year. I guess you could say I raise donkey corn.

 

Fom the little bit I learned from the German gardeners & farmers during my stay over there .... if you get the manure / biomat mix right during the compost cycle, it will get hot enough to kill the weeds / seeds and will be very good for putting on gardens and such. A fully functioning pile of manure compost will get hot enough to burn you.

Just letting it dry alone is not going to do it. Needs grass clippings, food waste from the kitchen ... things like that. Also needs to have some form of aeration to get some O2 to the bottom of the pile in order to keep things "percolating".

After it is done with the heat cycle ... add as many worms as you can to the pile and you will get some great benefit from the effort.

There is an actual science to it ... google it.

Cheers,
PISTOL

 

You wouldn't beleive the worms that have found their way into my garden after I started adding the equine manure to it.

 

Gut worms or earth worms ??

PISTOL

 

Have used horse manure many times after its decomposed it looks like black dirt i spread it on the yard till it in and plant grass....weeds will come up but use a weed killer to control them

 

I used cow manure on two spots 5x5 in the yard, approx 4 inches deep of it. Spread it in Oct, next year grass was so green and thick it was like sod.

Then comes the two month dry spell of 2006, and the two 5x5 spots turn brown first, the rest of the yard is still semi green of tall fescue.

I think it was over nurished and burn itself up. So I dug it all out UGH, found lots of grubs and bugs just in this spot, no other place.

I replanted with regular dirt, no problems since.

I think if you mix/till it, not use it 100%, you'll be ok, I however didn't have any luck with manure the way i used it.

 

Horse manure is basically the equivilent of 1-1-1 fertilizer, so as a fertilizer not really worth the effort, it does however add some organic matter to help retain some moisture and improve what are probably bad soils in the first place. Careful not to add too much as it can really tie up the water and rot your plants or reduce ability to leach if needed. Now for my proffessional suggestion, have a soil sample tested to see what really needs to be added, tests are less than 60 bucks per sample.

Mule Skinner - also a proffessional "golf course grass farmer"