fav organic materials

[Redbaron]

Try Alfalfa pellets for horses?

[Tonio]

Thank you Scott.
Urban setting here, so I don't see much of feed store type supplies.
There are some feed stores in my county, however - east side and the growing mecca up north.

[Tonio]

Scott, I forgot to mention that I tried one of your methods to no till prepping the soil: corn, greensand, newspaper and compost/mulch. In just 1 week I have worms galore !!

[Redbaron]

Congratulations! Glad I could help!

But Please give most the credit where it is due. Ruth Stout. Read her book over 30 years ago. Changed my whole thought process about gardening.

[bughunter99]

-2" top dressing of very finely chopped leaves in the fall
-Home grown compost plus vermicompost mixed into the soil fill for each planting hole.
-Neptunes Harvest Fish/Seaweed for intermittent feeds.
-Interplanting of beds with beneficials.
-Free well degraded horse manure about 1 month prior to planting
-Rockdust for remineralization
-water from the bottom of the koi pond. (I have a bottom drain)

-Stacy

Organic need not be pricey to accomplish, the more like nature, the better.

[b54red]

Originally Posted by Redbaron

Try Alfalfa pellets for horses?

I don't know what is going on with the price of alfalfa and cottonseed meal but it has gone up around here approximately 40 % in just the past year. I use 300 and 400 pounds of each respectively every year just as garden fertilizer. I bought cottonseed meal last year at under 11 dollars per 50 lbs and this year it is over 15 dollars. Alfalfa pellets did not go up quite as much but they started off with a higher price and are now over 17 dollars a bag when they were 13 last year. How they can say we are having little or no inflation is beyond me.

[henry]

Price of alfafa pellets would be mostly affected by the drought caused feed shortage which is unlikely to change in the short term. Cow herds are being culled but the farmers still have to buy feed for what they keep. wetter years is the only thing that will bring the price of feed down.
link to drought map.
http://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/

[greyghost]

Hay prices for my 2 horses have gone up terribly in the last few years. My
local hay supplier has stopped producing hay. He sites rising fuel, feritilizer,
seed prices and says he doesn't feel he can charge enough to make out
selling hay any longer. Also, the weather here has been so fickle-either terribly wet or a dought-that his barn has only been partially full. My supplier
before him also went out of business producing horse quality hay.

He has another, more lucrative business-it's the local dead/disabled
horse pickup and he and his wife were always telling me it's hard for them to keep up with business-a lot of people are euthanizing horses because of the high feed costs. Some of the feeds I'm using have gone up 50% in the last few years.

[Got Worms?]

I add about 4" of my own compost made of leaves, tree bark, wood shavings, grass, weeds, kitchen, and chicken house waste, etc. in the fall.

Then 2 more inches of compost in the spring, a few weeks before planting out; along with some peat moss and little lime and wood ash to balance out the addition of PM.

During the season I top dress and rake in alfalfa pellets, and coffee grounds. I also make and use compost tea, as both a foliage spray and soil drench. I will also add whatever else the plants ask for. When I can get them, I will bury fish scraps deeply in the beds.
Charlie

[Eirik]

I love to use nettles, so much N its incredible, use it either in the compost or as a compost tea.

[PNW_D]

Leaf mold, compost, and I'm starting to really like pine straw ......... a nice clean mulch ....... and from recent reading pine straw doesn't change ph that much

[bcrm630]

I am lucky that I have access to fresh beach seaweed year round, so depending on the storms that hit the PNW 49th parallel area, it goes straight from the beach to the tomato patch. Doing this for over thirty years! And it seems to delay the typical summer bight that hits in the late summer whenit starts to rain a bit.

Also last year tried comfrey tea foliar feed which worked out very well. Sprayed the tomato plants every 3 weeks or so after transplanting, and did the flowers every come out.

This year, I am trying a 2 year old fish soup fertilzer foliar feed that will be applied to the plants every 2 weeks to

[zeroma]

Pine cones and coffee grounds are on my menu this year for my new no till area. Even thous pine anything won't really change the pH much after it composts, I'm hopeful for a bit of change.

Limestone lives here - well anyway limestone based/clay soil is what we have.

Anyone use cocoa bean mulch? I know about it being poisious to dogs and cats, but I have used it when up in Wisconsin, where clay was the soil of the day and I loved it for adding texture and a wonderful scent (at least at first). We were close to the Hershey's processing plant there.

[TightenUp]

Originally Posted by zeroma

Pine cones and coffee grounds are on my menu this year for my new no till area. Even thous pine anything won't really change the pH much after it composts, I'm hopeful for a bit of change.

are you processing the pine cones in any way or just tossing them in? under the mulch?

[zeroma]

All will be under mulch when I'm done doing some layering of other organic stuff.