"Mary McHugh" wrote in message
...
I haven't posted here in quite a few years and have peeked in to see an
interesting thread about horse manure. I regularly use fresh horse manure
in the garden with no ill results.

A friend posted these results when she had her chicken and horse manure
tested. As you can see, horse manure is pretty low in nitrogen. It
definitely improves the organic content of the soil but IME, the chances
of burning is low.

The results:

"in the never ending quest to kill time,I thought I'd publish our
manure sample results...one is horse manure and the other chicken
litter..both about 60dys old:


lbs per ton horse

.365 N
8.39 P
11.4 K

moisture 45.2%

lbs per ton litter

23.2 N
80.3 P
70.1 K

moisture 37%"

Years ago, I remember reading an article which compared the nitrogen
content of the manures of various farm animals and horses were at the
bottom, and poultry was at the top, and these results support that
ranking.

We generally don't like to use herbicides around horses, even safe ones,
because horses are born trying to commit suicide and are relatively
"delicate", especially gastrointestinally speaking.

Some people do use feed-thru fly control (most well known is Equitrol mfg.
by Farnam Corp.) but there are questions about the safety of that. If you
google Equitrol, you can find a lot of data about it including the MSDS
at:
http://msds.farnam.com/m000238.htm

A LOT of horse owners who used to use Equitrol have switched to fly
predators instead.

BTW, I still had to add significant nitrogen to my garden even though I
regularly add horse manure all winter. P & K values were good though.

Hope this is interesting info for someone.

Regards,
Mary
Zone 6, CT


Another nice thing about chicken feces is its counter PH effect upon soil
with high alkaline content. Even works on pure caliche.
--
Dave