Grow Your Own Magazine

hello there!
i have a load of horse manure, some of it is well rotted, some not so much!
i hve a load of kitchen waste piled up in my garden rotting down,
im wondering what i can do with it?
shall i mix it together?
do i have to wait till its all rotted down to use it?
we have only recently got our allotment and we have still so much preperation to do, diggin up couch grass ect. ive mulched a clear area with cardboard, but need to know if i can improve the soil with waht i have or if i have to wait for it to compost, gettin itchy fingers!
ive read too many books, my brain exploded, and now i dont really know anything!
cheers buttercup x x

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Seriously, If you have some well rotted already don't mix it with anything else - just keep it where it is until you are ready to use it.

Have you got a compost bin or just a pile? It doesn't really matter, just that I find a bin (even home made as long as it's got back and sides to keep everything together) works better. You could mix the unrotted manure with the kitchen waste and leave to compost - should work beautifully

Keep the rotted stuff for your potatoes, squash, tomatoes and other gross feeders, and do as rustylady suggests with the fresh stuff and the kitchen waste.

Or, if it's really fresh, build a hot bed for germinating your seeds in.

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Kris

I child-proofed my house, but they still manage to get in.

Muddy Musings - a blog

As the compost temperature is cooling down at this time of year i reccommend that you place some fresh manure at the bottom of a new pile and this will increase the temp and encourage faster conversion to quality compost.

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I would use the rotted stuff now and mix the rest with the kitchen waste. Turning the compost heap will encourage it to get going again and the manure will also speed things up.

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Digger-07

"If you think you can, or think you can't, you're right" Henry Ford.

Woohoo!

That's exactly what I did yesterday!

Put my compost bin in position (with chicken wire underneath), got two barrow-fulls of manure, then chucked a load of grass type stuff I'd cleared from the plot on top of that, then my peelings et al on top of that. It's now about half full, which I guess will go down once it starts to rot?

Closed the lid, went home (after a bit of digging).