Claymend Anyone Use

[flowerbug]

I couldn't find the link but I saw recently that archeologists have uncovered 6 ft deep evidence of burning and composting in the Mayan empire area some 1,000 years ago and older. NOT natural since the jungle soil is only naturally inches deep. It takes Constant plant death to feed the jungle.

it's just a fact that life happens fast in the jungle and decomposition happens fast too so most of the nutrients in a jungle are in the biomass of the trees and animals.

it is also harder to keep carbon in the soil the warmer the climate. in the area where it is cooler here it is possible to have more and to keep it easier, but the most stable forms are those that last the longest (bits of charcoal and humus/humic acids).

 

[ducks4you]

I wanted to discuss this bc sometimes your local soil seems imPOSSIBLE to amend. I discovered that the supposedly super fertile farm soil, NORTH of the where the glaciars stopped, in my back yard, was compressed and full of clay. We don't think of who used it before us and how much of the nutrients have been stripped away and not replaced.
I have so much horse and chicken cleanup that I put it pretty much mulch with it everywhere on my property. It takes 4 months for horse manure to break down, 9 months for chicken manure to break down, and the pine and straw bedding can take longer. WherEVER you put compost or manure, the microbes grow and renew the soil.
Don't forgot about the leaves!! I asked a neighbor who was bagging maples leaves last weekend to drop some bags over the north pasture fence for me!!
First dry day (after the current and predicted light snowfall for the next 5 days) I will be spreading the leaves out in the north pasture where my horses overgraze. Horses will not poo where they eat. Ironically, the lushest areas are the edges and corners where they DO fertilize, so I have to help them.
Spreading cut up manure only isn't the best idea. You can lay down parasite eggs and they can ingest them. Leaves carry no parasites. AS LONG AS they do not have a chemical toxins, like the black walnut, red walnut or other toxic plants, AND I kick them off pasture for the winter to mulch them with my mower, I don't worry.
I also like to super clean my stalls from last season and spread that out too bc there are often hay/straw seeds that will sprout there next spring.
It's all about studying up, just like most of us know that it is impossible to grow vegetables under a walnut tree!

 

[flowerbug]

the biggest concerns i have about putting manures on gardens is if it is done too late in the season after the ground is frozen. if you can't get it spread and dug in before then you will have a lot more nutrient run off than is good for the surrounding waterways. better to hold it until spring then...

i've always been glad to have people give me leaves. i bury them in layers so that the worms can get at them, but i've also used them down deeper in very thick layers to perch a garden above the flash flood level. after a few years that thick layer is compacted and looks like peat moss. i can find things still i buried many years ago. nice to have stashes of organic materials around i can use...

 

[ducks4you]

the biggest concerns i have about putting manures on gardens is if it is done too late in the season after the ground is frozen. if you can't get it spread and dug in before then you will have a lot more nutrient run off than is good for the surrounding waterways. better to hold it until spring then...

That is hooey. I OFTEN pile up soiled stall/chicken bedding with manures after the freeze, then till them in the Spring. DH noted one of those tilling times in April, that it smelled sweet bc of the decomposition. This could NOT have happened in just one month of thawing. When I clean up after my horses I witness steaming straw with horse manure that steams bc it is breaking down. When you pile up this stuff, fresh or not, it creates insulation and heat that the microbes need to work. I am doing this today for some asters that I would like to survive the winter that is coming TOMORROW with a 3" snowfall predicted. They will be covered with 6-8 inches of it.
I know this from experience and I have A LOT of manure to deal with, 3 horses and 12 chickens worth.
I ALSO live in the county with our very own land grant University, where the eggheads live and explore their own theories. I have learned to take their advice with a grain of salt and accept ONLY from those who have lived it.
ANYWHERE that you want to dump manure and at any time of year is ALWAYS a good idea, for those who are wondering.
Just watch putting it directly next to plants in the growing season that will burn out from too much acid.
Our gardens have been put to bed for the season. Won't hurt them at ALL.

 

[Ridgerunner]

That is hooey. I OFTEN pile up soiled stall/chicken bedding with manures after the freeze, then till them in the Spring. DH noted one of those tilling times in April, that it smelled sweet bc of the decomposition. This could NOT have happened in just one month of thawing. When I clean up after my horses I witness steaming straw with horse manure that steams bc it is breaking down. When you pile up this stuff, fresh or not, it creates insulation and heat that the microbes need to work. I am doing this today for some asters that I would like to survive the winter that is coming TOMORROW with a 3" snowfall predicted. They will be covered with 6-8 inches of it.
I know this from experience and I have A LOT of manure to deal with, 3 horses and 12 chickens worth.
I ALSO live in the county with our very own land grant University, where the eggheads live and explore their own theories. I have learned to take their advice with a grain of salt and accept ONLY from those who have lived it.
ANYWHERE that you want to dump manure and at any time of year is ALWAYS a good idea, for those who are wondering.
Just watch putting it directly next to plants in the growing season that will burn out from too much acid.
Our gardens have been put to bed for the season. Won't hurt them at ALL.

Totally agree with that, sometimes with a dash of pepper too. They have access to a lot of knowledge but may tend to quote theory as if it were knowledge when they haven't experienced it. I find the same thing is true with master gardeners. They have a lot of local knowledge but may fall back on theory when they don't have personal experience. I give them all a lot of credit but that doesn't mean I quit thinking or forget my experiences when they say something.

I've never gardened and had access to animal manure where the ground stayed frozen all winter. I did spend a year in Korea when I was in the army, in a very rural area. There they use human manure on the fields same as they have been doing for thousands of years. I know all the prohibitions on using human, dog, or cat manure in compost or in the garden and I don't do it. But there they do, or at least did about 50 years ago. When the spring thaw hit in March or early April that smell was rank, you could not get away from it. But that only lasted a couple of weeks. After a couple of weeks the smell was gone. I don't know how long they waited to plant the rice, it was a while so the ground was warmed up and the stuff had time to work.

In Arkansas when I cleaned out the chicken coop I dumped that stuff in the garden, mainly places that needed it. Usually in late December of early January. I kept my coop so dry the wood shavings or manure did not compost. I know wood shavings are not supposed to go in the garden, wood is slow to compost and can take a lot of available nitrogen out of the ground until they compost. Those areas still produced tremendously better the next year and the ground was more friable. I think the texture improvement may have been as important as the nutrients.

 

[bobm]

I agree with ducks ... lots of hooey ... With over 30 horses and their manure to care for, I spread their offerings at 4-6" deep onto the pasture and or garden/ orchard 365 days per year . Where the manure is spread during the winter , the grass growth is 3-4 times vs. the unmanured areas right next to it.

 

[Dirtmechanic]

There are different types of clay to make life even more interesting. Here we have the ultisol found in high humidity, leached of pH raising minerals with about 2% organic matter. In our clay, biochar is a big help in addition to compost. We have the udult ultisol (red clay). There are those ultisols that have higher organic matter already and biochar does not really improve them. Here is a link to a soil type map. You have to zoom and zoom but it is color coded. The rest is reading and research, as a soil may have a type but the weather where the soil exists gives it unique characteristic and the taxonomists have sub-named the soils by that weather related (water and temp related) state.

 

[seedcorn]

ANYWHERE that you want to dump manure and at any time of year is ALWAYS a good idea

Actually NO. Not even close to being accurate. You are dumping small amounts in protected areas with a lot of fiber in it. So no, you are doing very little to no environmental damage. That is not what the “egg heads” are trying to stop. Here is where main stream media (& organic meat heads) take sound bites and leave the message totally obscured.

Statement may be-spreading manure from pits is illegal on frozen fields unless worked into ground. (It is regulated because of P levels leaching into streams, Rivers, etc and causing fish kills and algae bloom.). Some fields P,levels are off the chart.

Meat heads hear-Universities are trying to stop us from using manure to support the Ag retailer to sell fertilizer.

 

[flowerbug]

I agree with ducks ... lots of hooey ... With over 30 horses and their manure to care for, I spread their offerings at 4-6" deep onto the pasture and or garden/ orchard 365 days per year . Where the manure is spread during the winter , the grass growth is 3-4 times vs. the unmanured areas right next to it.

different areas have different requirements.

if you are in the eastern part of the country or anywhere the ground freezes and you can get unfiltered run-off into the streams then you would be adding manure and other nutrients to those streams. this should be common sense and if you don't know that you certainly should go do some work to relearn how to do things properly.

while many university "eggheads" may be in the pocket of various agri-chem manufacturers they often have other people who are actually measuring and researching actual real effects from such practices.

if you doubt that excess nutrients in streams by such distributed non-point sources is an issue go look at the research on "Dead Zones" in the oceans and why those happen along with the various algea blooms in both fresh water lakes and the oceans.

if you don't care about such issues then i really hope you don't have children because you're just pooping on their future with a big nasty ploppy.