Sod and Horse Manure

[rmonge00]

Hey everyone,

I have unlimited access to horse manure and have just taken about 3500 sq feet of sod out of the garden. Any suggestions on how to compost these... Right now I just have a gigantic pile of both... Should I layer it... Unfortunately, I have no heavy machinery to make things easy. I would be interested in hearing everyone's suggestions!

Thanks!

Ryan

 

[rmonge00]

anyone...

 

[Smiles Jr.]

If you have a small amount of soil on the sod it would make a wonderful compost with the manure layered in there. I never use any type of bin or other type of containment for my compost piles. It may take a year or so to break down but it will be great when it's finished. Good luck.

 

[seedcorn]

1) describe the horse manure. Manure, urine with what carrier? straw, wood shavings?
2) Black top soil, clay base, sand base?

Good news is that horse manure will not be hot but the carrier could give you a huge nitrogen deprivation to plants until it's broken down.

 

[patandchickens]

I don't see any particular point in combining the two unless you simply want to consolidate into a single pile.

Left to their own devices, the sod (stacked upside down in a pile covered with upside-down old carpet) will relatively quickly go back to topsoil -- if your covering has been incomplete, you may get some grass regrowth in the exposed areas but the majority of the pile will be topsoil just like the topsoil the lawn was growing on by this Fall.

Whereas, left to its own devices, the horse manure will turn into nice fluffy high-organic-content compost (in the interior of the pile anyhow) in 6-24 months depending on how much bedding is mixed in with it. If it's stall cleanings, it probably has so much straw or shavings mixed in that it may compost pretty slowly; if it is mostly-manure shed cleanings or something like that, it can go pretty fast.

Of course you certainly *can* mix them togehter if you prefer, but I'm not sure you really gain anything that way.

Good luck, have fun,

Pat

 

[rmonge00]

The horse manure has no straw - i think it is some sort of wood shaving.... How long until it is usable? I am sure it has urine- what do you mean by carrier? How should I compost the manure to make sure tons of weeds don't grow out of it? I was thinking about letting it sprout and then covering it...

Ryan

 

[rmonge00]

The sod is in a sand-based topsoil with lots of worm, not tons of organic material...

 

[rmonge00]

The sod is in a sand-based topsoil with lots of worms, but not a ton of organic material...

 

[patandchickens]

The horse manure has no straw - i think it is some sort of wood shaving.... How long until it is usable? I am sure it has urine

So it's stall cleanings... most often (I have worked at a lot of horse barns, and boarded/ridden/trained/hung-out at many many more) stall cleanings are typically VERY heavy on shavings compared to the amount of manure and urine content. I've seen some people clean stalls such that it the stuff doesn't compost for a number of years and even then it isn't really exactly compost so much as it is very old shavings, you know? OTOH some places are much stingier and discard a lot less shavings per am't of manure... that can take as little as a year if kept damp enough. If you have a source of additional high-N containing material (like *pure* manure, from picking up in horse paddocks or cleaning chickens' droppings-boards or stuff like that, or fresh grass cleanings, or even a high-N commercial fertilizer if you want) that can be mixed in to accelerate composting.

It really takes very, very little bedding mixed into the manure to hit the right C:N ratio. For what it's worth (for comparison), I will tell you that my horse-shed cleanings from wintertime (the horses live out 24/7 but I pick out their shed and the area around it every day) are composed almost entirely of pure horse manure with just a little bit of accidentally-wasted hay mixed in; it seems to be about bang-on the optimal C:N ratio because as long as it is kept damp it is usable in 3-4 months and *beautiful* after that.

So you can look at what you've got and make a guess, but chances are good that it is very high on the C end of the ratio at the moment.

How should I compost the manure to make sure tons of weeds don't grow out of it?

You can't, other than trying to put it into a roughly cubical shaped pile so that as much as possible will heat up enough to kill the weeds. If you are in need of exercise, you can wait til it has been 160 F inside for 2-3 days and then re-pile the whole thing so that what *was* the outside of the pile is now the inside... but even that will not kill all the weed seeds.

If the horses are eating only alfalfa hay (no grass hay, and not fed grain) and not turned out to graze anywhere, it will not be weedy. In other circumstances, it is likely to have some weeds of some sort, but there is really not much of anything you can do about that.

Personally I try to avoid horse compost for the upper layers of my garden unless it is several years old... I use the fresher stuff only when it's being deposited in the underneath layers of a dug-over area, when possible.

But OTOH, most of the weeds you'll get are either annuals (which are easy enough to kill with a hoe) or grasses (whcih are easy to pull up permanently as long as you catch them very young) so it is not a *huge* deal.

I was thinking about letting it sprout and then covering it...

The problem is only the outer layer will sprout, ie not much of it; and also not everything sprouts at once.

Better to just try to use the fresher stuff in areas where weed germination is not so likely to occur (i.e. underground) and then just FIGURE you'll have to do a certain amount of hoeing or whatever other weed control method you prefer

The composted sod, btw, is often a worse weed problem IME... unless you are real real careful to sort thru the resulting topsoil to pull out the last surviving grass roots before putting it into the garden, you get lots of little bits of grass trying to colonize, which if it's lawngrass can be kind of inconspicuous (to me anyhow) until it has really gotten going to the point of being harder to remove

Weeds happen. People cope

Good luck, have fun,

Pat