Aerobic versus Anaerobic

Discussion in 'Jobs, projects, courses, training, WWOOFing, volun' started by Benjy136, Jun 17, 2012.

  1. Benjy136

    Benjy136 Junior Member

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    I have two 5 gallon buckets. One with 4 gallons of fresh horse poop and one with old rabbit poop that stayed in a plastic garbage bag for several weeks. I 've placed aeration hoses in the bottom of the buckets and put water in the buckets covering the poop. Will the aerobic bacteria encouraged here outstrip any anaerobics in the rabbit poop, and can I use the rabbit tea brewed here in my garden? I'm a newbie. Thank you in advance,

    Benjy
     
  2. cottager

    cottager Junior Member

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    Hi Benjy,

    In the same way that turning compost can re-activate the aerobic bacteria (and overwhelm the anaerobic bacteria), the bubbler in the buckets will create conditions better suited to the aerobic bacteria, so the stench should subside reasonable quickly (that will be how you tell that the anaerobic bacteria are less active ... there will be less rotten egg gas type smells :) ).

    Rabbit manure is more of a cold manure, and comes in handy little pellets, so if you get any more rabbit manure (or sheep/goat/alpaca), converting it into compost or manure tea is not absolutely necessary as it can be sprinkled around the garden fresh.

    And yes, the rabbit manure tea can be used in the garden, although it might be wise to dilute it a bit (1 part tea to about 10 parts water is easy to remember).
     
  3. Benjy136

    Benjy136 Junior Member

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    Cottager:

    Thank you for the info. I noticed this eve. when I checked the buckets, the "old rabbit poop smell" was gone. I would like to get some idea of how long I keep the buckets aereated before using them for tea or worm food. Thanks again,

    Benjy
     
  4. cottager

    cottager Junior Member

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    I would start using it now, especially on the worm farm, because to continue to aerate it will eventually lead to fermentation (the yeasts will move in after the bacteria have worked on it for a while) and the effect of that will be to further break down the manure (which is not so necessary for rabbit) and the tea will become increasingly acidic. Worms prefer a slightly alkaline environment, so it would be kinder to them to provide the tea earlier in the process, rather than later.

    On the other hand, most plants like a slightly acidic environment, so mixing some of your worm tea (which should be slightly alkaline) with your older rabbit manure tea, and then diluting that, might end up making a delightfully nutrious tonic for your plants.

    Fundamentally, anytime between now and later is good, so I'd say now for the rabbit tea ... it's food for worms/plants and less work for you :)

    On the horse manure, I'll leave that to someone to answer as I don't use it to make a tea, but I do believe that the horse tea would still be too fresh and "hot" to apply to your plants.
     
  5. Benjy136

    Benjy136 Junior Member

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    Cottager:

    Once again, thank you. Briansworm uses, unless I misread him, fresh cow and/or horse poop with very good results with his worms. I can get, at no cost, all the horse poop I want, and have a pickup truck full of rabbit manure at least 6 months old. A friend had show rabbits (250 of them) and was pretty lazy about letting piles of poop accumulate under the cages. When enough complaints were posted from the neighborhood he sold them all off and removed the cages about 6 months ago. The stuff has been weathering all this time and Im sure the urine has been leached out by now, I tilled in a thick layer in my garden this winter while the worms were deep in the ground, then mulched the area with wheat straw, It has lots of worms in it now, but plenty slugs and millipeds so no produce can remain on the ground and ripen, Ergo, my strawberries are history before they're ripe. I'd better be off, now, or I miss the post. Thanks again lol

    Benjy
     
  6. cottager

    cottager Junior Member

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    Benjy, I would believe that Brian would be careful with his application ... yes, worms adore the material (it's built, just for them!) ... the cautionary note (that I'm sure Brian applies) is that fresh cow/horse poo from an animal recently treated for worms ... will kill the worms in the garden rather effectively.

    Ageing the manure first for a few weeks goes a long way to ameliorate the worming issue (as well as the "hot manure" issue).

    Having said that, if you know your source (and don't use it fresh after the animals are wormed) and apply it carefully (away from direct contact with the plants and their surface roots ... more or less surrounding the plant, rather than on it), good success can be had with hot/fresh manures as a direct application. I don't, but it can be done, and can be done well, with care.
     
  7. briansworms

    briansworms Junior Member

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    Ben I have finally found what you have been talking about with the aereating the manure. There is no need to do this as once applied to the worm beds oxygen can enter the manure and if you dig it over so the air can get to it the manure will become aerobic.

    I don't use manure on my gardens as I don't really garden. I do spread worm castings around though.

    Ben is right that I do use fresh steaming manure if I can get it. Very fresh cow manure is full of lactose brucillus bacteria which is one of the best foods for worms. A note of caution that the manure is not applied too deep or more than the worms can handle in a few days. They consume it before it gets a chance to heat up. With the worming issueI have spoken to one of Australias leading Worm Growers and he has never heard of worms being killed by worming products. I would think internal parasites would be a different thing to earthworms. Most products break down extemely fast now days anyway. I have had no problem with manure from many different sources. I think people just think worms and worm product and put two and two together. Next time my daughter worms her horse I will grab some fresh poo and put it in a test bin and see if the worms survive.
     
  8. cottager

    cottager Junior Member

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    Brill! Thanks Brian, I would be very interested to hear the outcome of that experiment! :)

    (I'm surrounded by the racing industry, and, like Ben, have limitless access to the horse-poo resource, so I wouldn't mind knowing, just from a personal level).

    PS. I'm guessing, that even if the worms don't make it, the eggs should mostly make it ... but that is pure guessing, so I shall wait!

    PPS. Fresh cow manure seems ... more earthy? than horse. Makes no sense in words, but I can understand that it's almost a fermented grass product, if you can get onto the good stuff.
     
  9. S.O.P

    S.O.P Moderator

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    Cow has 4 stomachs. Horse has one.

    Cow manure looks processed and not much like grass. Horse manure is grass in convenient ball shaped form (except when you are turning compost and it's rolling around everywhere).
     
  10. cottager

    cottager Junior Member

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    Thanks SOP.

    Brian, Invermectin is the worming treatment I was expressing concern over. It kills ... frogs, worms, mites, lice, some dogs, and a few other creatures. Watch your inputs was what I was about (with very much respect for your methods, given a clean input product - your method definately works).
     
  11. S.O.P

    S.O.P Moderator

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    Is that something the horse-racing industry would be using? When will we see the all-organic sweepstakes?
     
  12. cottager

    cottager Junior Member

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    Curious ... I have never walked up the road and asked that question. Good question ...

    And on the all-organic sweepstakes ... I'll be there! (with a bit of micro-brewery organic beverage in hand, of course ;) )
     
  13. Benjy136

    Benjy136 Junior Member

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    Brian"

    Veeery interesting. All I know is the stink goes away when the poop is aereated, whereas the stuff put raw into the bed still smells for a while even covered, and after it's aereated, the worms almost fight over it. The 14 days are almost up for one of my AN buckets, but I'm taking your advice and letting it wait another week. I may transfer them to another bin like the one I fixed up for the RWs. By the way, the horses my poop comes from are not wormed. Thanks again for all the input. lol

    Benjy
     
  14. briansworms

    briansworms Junior Member

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    Most of my manure comes from my daughters horse and the stuff I buy now and then is usually a couple of weeks old anyway by the look of it. I get my cow manure from the cattle yards oposite the Carrara Markets on the Gold Coast. Dave the chap who looks after them puts it out under the tres on the side of the road. The good stuff he puts under one tree and lets me know which one so I can get it anytime.

    I think with the worming products it would be fairly well broken down by time it gets through the cow. I will see if I can get a spent syringe when my daughter next worms the horse and I will rinse it out over some worms. I have millions so using some for science is reasonable lol.
     
  15. Jim Hunt

    Jim Hunt Junior Member

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    Cottager, have you seen any research or personally experienced the killing of earthworms by Ivermectin? In my experience worm researchers and true experts like Rhonda Sherman tend to say that they've never heard of earthworms being killed by worming products.

    Brian, I'd love to hear the results of your trial.
     
  16. cottager

    cottager Junior Member

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    J.Hunt ... yes, and yes.

    On a personal basis, I have personally shovelled many a trailer-load of horse manure (at the request of a horiculturalist friend). No worms. Horses rececently treated, dead (large) piles of manure. Still nice poo, composted a bit, but no worms (where there should be worms in a large meterage pile on the ground).

    True experts? Rhonda Sherman seems to know her stuff ... are you claiming (as the tone of your message suggests) that I am not a true expert? I haven't seen anything you've posted that suggests that Rhonda Sherman is claiming that Ivermectin has nothing less that the half-life of 7 days that it does (exposure to sunlight helps, a lot, to speed up the breaking/half-life process).

    From https://www.santacruzwire.com

    STILL TOXIC
    Ivermectin can be fatal to certain breeds of herding dogs and to numerous aquatic creatures, and can cause nausea, headache and heart irregularities if splashed onto human skin. In addition, tainted manure can kill worms in compost bins, according to Karin Grobe, worm composting specialist for Santa Cruz County.

    I also am more inclined to like real field studies. The vast pile of non-worm manure was a huge eye-opener to me, and led me along the path of studying why worm-treated animals manures may not be immediately beneficial to our ground and compost worms. It doesn't seem to take much, to turn it around, but it's worth knowing that freshly treated animals manure may not be so great in a worm farm.

    So, Jim ... how do you define a "true expert"? Brian is an expert, because he's been doing, and talking, and practicing (and now selling).
     
  17. Jim Hunt

    Jim Hunt Junior Member

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    No Tone

    Well, I didn't realize that my post had a tone. My reference to true experts was in comparison to myself--who I don't consider to be a true expert.

    Thanks for the personal experiences cottager. It's always nice to hear from someone who knows rather than someone who's repeating industry myths.
     
  18. briansworms

    briansworms Junior Member

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    Please don't call me an expert LOL. I am here learning like a few other people. As Jim said it is great to hear from people with actual experience. We have to make mistakes or we never learn anything but sometimes it is good to get some good advice.

    I am having a problem with one of my beds and the worms are doing a Walk Out at night. The waether is just perfect for it. I know how to fix it and I did know at the time I was overloading the bed but pushed my luck anyway as I had no spare tubs and the other beds are at capacity. Best I post this so I can make it in time to get some more tubs.

    I must ask my daughter about that worming stuff so I can test it out.
     
  19. cottager

    cottager Junior Member

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    Sorry Jim, I must have been in a bit of a sensitive mood (text is SUCH a difficult communication method! ... tones where there's no tone intended by the writer ... one day I might get the hang of writing, and READING, more clearly!).

    And Brian, nup. Not going to stop calling you an expert ... 'cause from my perspective, you know the names of the different types of worms, and I don't lol (except for the scrubbies, 'cause they are peculiar, totally different in personality and really easy to spot :D ).
    But, quite keen to hear of your experiments with your daughters horses poo, with info on what she's used as the treatment, if you get the manure to cause a reaction with the worms (or even if there's no reaction ... that would also be goodly information).

    I had walkout on a 2 tonne worm bed once ... that was a bit spectacular! Running a much smaller scale now, but there's something about the winter time veggies that seem to cause it a bit more (maybe more sulphur content in the vegetable matter? ... that's just a theory, not really tested by me, but ... maybe one day I'll test that lol). Certainly barometric pressure and humidity makes a huge difference, as does the volumn/quantity of worms in the beds ... more worms = higher likelihood to walkout ... like they hit a critical volumn and begin to move, especially if there is a lot of fresh food, it's like "there must be food everywhere and the family needs to expand ... lets go!").

    Anyways, I rather do like what worms do ... a very underated resource that deserves positive promotion. I would like to see a day where councils actively promote the use of worm farms as a residential method of consuming vegetable waste in every household. Fundamentally it has to be cheaper for a council to promote/subsidise househould worm farming over the cost of continuing to pick up putrescible waste and burying it in council waste facilities.
     
  20. briansworms

    briansworms Junior Member

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    I sent my daughter a message asking for a used worming container. It is funny that I can now look into a bed with many thousands of worms and spot the odd one. Usually it is an African mixed in with the Reds or Lumbricus rubellus or round the other way. The Africans I usually spot soon as I pull back the cover, they move much faster jump around more when disturbed and a bit different colour. They also don't seem to go backwards.

    That run a way bed has settled down now. No idea what the cause was. The worms when are crowded will move to the corners like sheep in a paddock and will cram in so tight it triggers the walk out syndrome. After rain especially. They weren't that crowded but they were in some crappy manure I had. They also were recently combined from 2 breeder beds I had.

    The Gold Coast City Council run Worm Farming Workshops every month. They have Brian's Worms down as a supplier. I get a few sales at time from them.
    https://www.greengc.com.au/take-act...arming-workshops/Sustainable-Garden-Workshops

    Just heard back from my daughter and she just wormed the horse the other day and threw the container out. She will ask some other people. What this space lol.

    I have enough hassles with the tubs I have without huge worm beds. With my new management practices I am breeding too many for my needs now so have put most worms in a grow out beds or a holding pattern till I clear some stock. I only have two breeding beds of Lumbricus rubellus and 2 of Africans if they ever breed lol. The Lumbricus rubellus breeders are about to be sold off and replaced with fresh younger breeding stock. The same worms have been breeding for about 4 months now under my new system and several months prior with no signs of slowing down.
     

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