How to Use Horse Manure in a Garden

Growing a healthy, fruitful garden requires more than seeds, dirt and water. The plants need fertilizer to get all the nutrients they need to grow quickly and make big, beautiful flowers or fruit. While there are many fertilizers available at various farm and garden supply stores, they are expensive and made with chemicals.
Horse manure is an effective natural fertilizer, and possibly the best part about it is that there is a ready and renewable supply of it. In fact, anyone who has horses probably has more of it than they can use, and most are more than willing to get rid of it. Horse manure is rich in nutrients that it slowly releases over time.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Horse manure Containers for transport, such as heavy duty garbage bags Shovel Cultivator Vegetable matter like compost, dry leaves or hay mulch

1. Locate a supply of horse manure. Check with friends who have horses or look in the phone book for horse training or boarding stables. Call them and ask if they will let you have any manure. They will probably be happy to let you have it, as long as you go get it. If they want to charge you, try someone else.

2. Collect the manure. It is a good idea to wear a dust mask while you gather the manure, because when it is dried it can be dusty, and you do not want to inhale it. You can shovel the manure into heavy duty garbage bags to transport it. Get the oldest manure you can, because composted manure has the least amount of pathogens and nitrogen, so it is the least likely to burn your plants or make fruit unsafe to eat. However, fresh manure is fine to use if you use it in the fall, well before you plant. Composted manure can be used any time of the year.

3. In the fall, cover the planting beds with three to four inches of manure and mix it into the top few inches of soil with the cultivator.

4. Cover the manure/soil mixture with mulch made from hay or dry leaves. Some people also add compost from their kitchen pile and mix it in.

5. Before planting, turn over the soil and compost with the cultivator.

6. Apply small amounts of composted manure from time to time throughout the planting and harvesting season.