The Power of Manure & Tree Farming

Whenever any of our friends have excess manure available, we take it all. If you are a gardener or interested in plants, we recommend you to do the same. While flies can be an issue in the short term, frogs and birds will be hard at work to fatten up on them within days.

The most commonly available is horse manure as they are in essence expensive pets ( & investment) and the owners want their bedding changed daily or with a high frequency to prevent hoof diseases and limit the volume of flies.

Therefore horse bedding tends to be mostly just sawdust or wood chips with very little horse manure and urine mixed in. It can be used directly as a potting medium as long as it is not too hot.

Horse manure is also slightly acidic which is preferred by conifers.

Other manure, such as chicken, cattle or hog are also great value to the nursery, but they are too high in nitrogen and other nutrients and will burn the plants. They need to be ripened to turn into compost and mixed in with other organic matter to decrease their potency. If a plant is exposed to hot manure, in essence the water will move from the plants out into the hot manure and the plants will dry out as the reverse osmosis will not be able to move water into the plant.

Apart from horse manure, we use plenty of leaf compost and pine shavings as potting medium and plenty of inorganic fertilizers as well to keep our plants growing vigorously.