"Sacha" wrote in message
"Farm1" please@askifyouwannaknow wrote:
"Sacha" wrote in message

I used to have a book called The Untidy Gardener and the author
describes
asking someone to clean out the stables, saying she would be able
to
use the
manure on her flower beds. Next thing she knew, he'd chucked it
straight
onto the beds from the stables and she was convinced all her
plants
would be
damaged. She describes seeing them 'waving helplessly' from
above
great
mounds of steaming manure. However, they survived, the winter
and
the worms
did their work and all was well, though it's not a recommended
practice,
admittedly. And NB, these were flower beds, not veg beds.

I hope that the point of the story was that the author had learned
how
to be a good gardener from that experience and that this lesson
was
why she turned into an untidy gardener.

I think she was an untidy gardener to start with!

A woman afte my own heart. Bless her.

And IIRC, her name is
Elizabeth Craigie but I'm stretching my memory back a long way.

Is ti worth trying to track down do you reall?

I get an attack of the irritations every time I see advice about
the
'need' to rot horse manure..I always wonder about whether the
person
giving the advice has ever experiemented or is just parroting book
learning.

It doesn't need rotting at all, ever. It may need some judicious
thought about placement but it can go on some spot or other in the
garden straight from the end of the horse's alimentary canal. I
know
because I've used it that fresh and never found any detrimental
effect. It may not look pretty and the well rotted stuff does
look
prettier but with mulch on top, who cares or will even notice?

It's more important to rot down cow and chicken manure, AIUI but I
think the
point of leaving horse manure in a heap is to allow weed seeds to be
washed
out by the rain or to be taken out by the proud owner of the manure
heap. I
think the horse's alimentary canal does a good job of preparing the
manure
for use by the gardener.

I think that heaping it is a total waste of time - too much risk of
losing nutrients. As a bulk user of horse poop, I find that I get
more weeds that are windblown than I do from the poop. And the thing
about horse poop is that it is such a good soil amendment material,
that any weeds that do manage to get through are so easily puilled out
that they aren't even a minor problem.