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Old March 1, 2018   #15
bower
Tomatovillian™
 
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Join Date: Feb 2012
Location: Newfoundland, Canada
Posts: 6,793
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One thing I noticed over the years, as a gardener without manure animals and therefore bought various kinds of manure from different sources, is that besides weeds, there is a different profile of insects/inverts associated with different manures I've had. It is certainly true you can get a lot of horsey weeds with horse manure, but you'll also get fantastic amounts of worms. Most of the horse manure I've gotten was rotted enough that it didn't bring a lot of flies with it - this wasn't the case with cow manure I had one year, which hatched out a huge crop of flies. Curiously it attracted different birds too - we had "Foxy-diggers" around that year which are not common here in the woods. They were definitely after the flies, and didn't return the following year. I wasn't that impressed with the cow manure value, and didn't like the smell or the flies, although it's true there were no weeds... so I've stuck with horse manure for the most part, when I can get it. In recent years, there are lots of dried chicken manure products on the market. They've been heat treated and don't carry disease or insects, and they're easy to use. So that has become a favorite for me in the manure department.
I've seen great results in the gardens of people who keep chickens, it certainly is good stuff.
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