Iluv2hunt, Reading the description of your 1st picture caused me to laugh, especially the word "zoo". Having been in the cow business and a 1/2 way cowboy for years, I recognize some of the elements in the manure pile but I was wondering if the secret to your successful garden might be some exotic :crap: ingredients? Is there by chance any monkey manure or perhaps some cheeta droppings in the pile? Might account for the fast growth? Just an ol' man's thoughts :rolleyes .Treefarmer
Treefarmer,
Lmao! No this is a little privately owned place. She takes in mainly farm animals as rescues(abandoned/abused, etc) and rehabs them. Mostly horses, donkeys, mules, etc. She does have a few goats and sheep as well as rabbits. She runs it as a petting zoo and has field trips of kids come visit, mostly special needs schools. All the manure gets mucked and brought out daily to a huge pile. She advertises it for free and a lot of people flock to go get it. However, I usually toss her a couple bucks for feed or at least tip the stall hand as he usually helps me load it in my truck. She said one guy was coming almost daily and getting an entire trailer load. He was running it thru a chipper/shredder and covering his entire yard
No monkeys or cheeta's!
10-4, Iluv2hunt.
I spotted the horse manure at the base of the pile, we miss not having fertlizer producers any more. However the man that rented part of our place last year to plant peanuts, uses chicken litter on his fields. They have a big ol' tandem axle dump truck and haul to each location and dump it, then load into a big buggy spreader with a front end loader and then spread over the field. He made a round through our garden spots also, kind "fowl" for a day or two! Organics like these are usually very cost effective and cut way down on the amount of commercial fertlizer required to make a crop.
It dropped to 31 this morning around 5am, next couple of days are supposed to be colder in this part of the world. Maybe we will have a spring garden started in a few weeks.
Treefarmer
I have a flock of 9 hens. The waste from them is like gold. Granted it's not pure poop like you get from a chicken farm, mine is mixed with shavings, and smaller scale obviously. Every couple months I shovel everything out and put it into barrels to age for a couple months before I use it. Being its got shavings, I "mulch" my plants with it. Just did it yesterday as matter of fact, so I have 4 full barrels now. Chicken poop is one of those that has to be aged or composted as it is considered a hot nitrogen and will burn plants slap up. Of course you probably know that already.
Plus I get this every day!
I'm trying potatoes in barrels and bags for the first time. First attempt was a failure. I got seed potatoes and cut them into pieces with each piece having a eye. Advice that was given was to let each piece dry out a couple weeks before planting. They all shriveled up and died. I had a couple Idaho potatoes in the kitchen that had grown eyes. I planted the whole things and they took off like rockets
Winn dixie had a sale on red potatoes so I bought a bag of them and let them sit in the garage on a shelf. They all grew eyes and I planted them. Looks like they took off too, and I just added mulch yesterday
I saved another batch of potatoes to plant maybe in another month to kind of stagger my planting. Hopefully I will have sacks full of taters in a couple months
You basically add a layer of mulch, then dirt as they grow and unroll the bags as needed. Just keep doing that till the bag is full, then let them grow till the growth dies. At that point you should have taters. Plus you can reuse the dirt!
