Me again.......

Since I feel like I'm on a bit of a roll with this newsgroup at
present, here's another one for you. A neighbour has offered me some
horse manure. Quite a lot of it, as it happens. As we're building some
new raised vegetable beds, would it be OK to dump about a 4 - 6" deep
layer in the bottom, which would then be covered by a mixture of
topsoil and compost (about a further 10")

The beds are going to be 20" high on the outside, and whilst some of
the volume will be filled with the earth we removed to get the
surrounding area level, I'm going to need rather a lot of soil/compost
whatever to fill them. I'd be intending to cover these beds with a
further 3" manure each autumn, allowing the worms to do their stuff
over the winter (unless, of couse, we decide to overwinter veg in one
of the beds). If I need to rot down the manure first, how long should
I store it before using. I should probably mention that it doesn't
have a high straw content, unlike some of the 'stable sweepings' that
get passed off as horse manure these days.

Cheers

Tim