Glenna Rose wrote:

writes:
So I've dug these 4' deep by 5' diameter pits in order to put soil into my
potato tire towers. A kind friend gave me a load of reasonably dry horse
manure, which nicely filled the pits back up to grade level. What do I do
with this stuff now? Keep it moist so it will rot? Cover it with dirt? Put
wood shavings on top? Buy some worms and let'em loose? The surrounding
soil,
by the way, is compacted sand - it drains well, but is stable enough to
maintain a vertical hole as deep as I care to dig...

You are very fortunate, Dick, for such a gift. If you have plants to
spread a thin layer around, use it for that. You can just leave it in a
pile for future use. No need to keep it moist, it'll take care of itself.
As for the worms, they will come, no need to purchase any. The horse

I've just (in mid-May) put a trench into my front herb garden and filled
it with 3 m3 horseshit, supplied by my neighbor - who keeps horses. The
manure is nicely burned, been in the manure heap below the stables since
last year.

I put about 20 cm of soil (the soil I had dug out to make the trench in
the first place) On top of the heap of steaming brown stuff, after which I
replanted my herbs.

The result is a hotbed, and can't be done in autumn: the plants may not
have time to reroot and get ready for winter, and in fact the heat from
below fools them into thinking that summer is still going strong, even
in late autumn, so even if they had time they won't get winter-ready.

I have _enormous_ leaves on my biennials this year. That's milk thistle,
clary sage, and similar. I'm a tad concerned that the soil might be
too rich for some of the herbs, but so far no casualties, beyond the ones
that were due to dug-up plants being parked on newspaper for the two weeks
I was busy digging.

Henriette

--
Henriette Kress, AHG Helsinki, Finland
Henriette's herbal homepage: http://www.ibiblio.org/herbmed
Best of RHOD: http://www.ibiblio.org/herbmed/rhod/main.html