"Milner" wrote in
:


I also have some bags (of a different brand) of manure, which were
stored below the bags of compost in the large stack, on opening one of
these I also found it to be very damp and heavy. From what you have
said I suspect that these have also suffered from poor storage, but
I'm not really sure what to expect from manure. Would these bags also
benefit from emptying into a pile? As a matter of fact, would you
expect manure to be useful for growing compost? My supervisor
suggested that nettles would grow well in it because of high nitrogen
content.

Yes.

Spent last weekend trying to disentangle nettles from an area of garden
where a lot of elderly deer manure had been dumped. Gawd it was a task.
Like most plants though, it would need to be well-rotted manure, not the
fresh stuff.

Manure is damp and heavy by default, so the stuff you have may not be badly
stored but just ready for use. Compost that has 'gone off' sometimes
smells kind of mushroomy.

This may be stupidly obvious, but just in case - you probably want to be
fairly sure that all the planting medium is as similar as possible - I
dunno about nettles, but other plants seem to be more prone to aphid attack
in some soils than others. I think it's usually to do with how quickly it
dries out.

Victoria