Big pile-o-poo!

At last - the poo has arrived!


Seriously - that's a lot of horse manure!

Why did I just pay $65 to have a bunch of horse manure dumped in my yard? Because most of it will go into the in-ground bed you see in the right of the picture above, and the rest will get turned into the raised beds.

Now before you go getting all squeamish about your veggies growing in horse poop, think about it. Sure, it was gross when it came out the back end of that horse, but all of the stuff you see above was gathered, along with sawdust bedding, back in August at Sun Beau Horse Farms in Ravenna. They piled it all up outside, and left it over winter. Mother Nature then took over, using chemical reactions with the "super hot" (high nitrogen) horse manure, the shaved wood that was all dried out, the worms crawling through out consuming it and leaving castings (worm poop) and tunnels in their path, and then there's all the micro-organisms that went to work on it. Trust me, this stuff has seriously been worked over!

Now it's still steaming a bit - again, that's because of the chemical reactions going on in the pile. I would've liked to have had it slightly more aged before delivery, but that just didn't work out. Trust me, once it gets tilled into the garden, mingled with the soil that's already there (and it's host of organisms ready to go to work), plus about 10 bags of dead leaves I added to the garden last fall, it'll finish composting in no time.

And that will all make for some seriously good plant food!!! If the stuff were TOO fresh, it'd burn/damage the plant roots. But it should be far enough along that, by the time the plants go into the garden, they'll just think it's the best thing around. And that'll make for better plant growth, which in turn will make for better veggies!

One of the disadvantages of horse manure (along with many other farm animals) is that they eat a lot of weeds - and yet aren't able to digest all of the seeds. That means I'll be real busy fighting weeds in the garden this summer. Trust me, I'm used to that. Cow manure would be better - cows have multiple guts and do a better job of digesting anything that goes in their mouth before sending it out the other end. Unfortunately, I don't have a good source for composted cow manure without buying it by the bagful at the local garden centers or Walmart. I'd love to get my hands on some...well, you know what I mean.

Oh and hey, speaking of composting stuff, have you seen the new Sun Chips bags??


That's right - by eating snack food, you too can help the environment!!! I promise you, this Sun Chips bag will be going in our compost to break down and then be added into the garden...