Question about liquid manure

Discussion in 'Planting, growing, nurturing Plants' started by Flatland, Aug 15, 2016.

  1. Flatland

    Flatland Member

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    I have used liquid horse manure for some time. But I have been reading up about how to make and use it and i do things very differently so would like some thoughts.

    i just throw a bucket of old horse manure in a rubbish bin of water and leave it to get smelly. then I dilute it to "weak tea". It takes me anywhere been 1 and 4 months to use it all and then I throw the dregs onto some plant and start again. I have read that the liquid should be strained after a couple of weeks and used in a matter of weeks. Does it really matter if it hangs around for longer? Does it get weaker/stronger and does it really matter? I use it mainly on fruit trees and veggies. My soil is very sandy and very deficient in everything. i am adding compost to the soil but that takes time and I feel in the mean time the plants need some help to grow.

    I am basically lazy so if it doesn't really make make difference I will always take the least effort way
     
  2. Bryant RedHawk

    Bryant RedHawk Junior Member

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    What you are doing is sound, anaerobic compost tea. Depending on how large your brewing vat is, you might do better to leave the tailings in there until you have gone through two or three brewing sessions. Straining just gets the particulates out of the way. As in most "foods" (teas are plant food) fresher is better but I don't see any adversity to using your brewed tea as you need it. The whole idea of using teas is to stretch your compost and manure fertilizers as far as you can. There is nothing wrong with using your tea once a week, it will help improve your soil, allowing you to augment that sandy soil one patch at a time, as you can.

    If you find some free clay type soil, adding some of that to your garden beds will help your soil retain any compost you add. Sandy soils seem to act like compost disposals, the stuff just disappears rather quickly without some fine particles to grab hold of the compost and help it stick around longer.
     
  3. songbird

    songbird Senior Member

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    agreed Bryant. also with some clay to hold moisture there is a better chance worms
    will also be around and they will clump/aggregate soils together within castings which
    also helps.

    as far as compost teas go, i've never done them here. i don't have horses or other
    animals other than worms.

    to help the trees the most i'd be putting the horse poo around the trees and let
    nature do the rest. pick one each week and go in rotation...

    and my previous recommendations. keep scrounging every bit of free organic
    material you can to supplement until you get a good cover crop growing. then
    keep chopping and dropping to increase the rate of root/exhudeate cycling.
     
  4. Flatland

    Flatland Member

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  5. Flatland

    Flatland Member

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    Thanks for the comments. I am madly adding poo around the trees and any big veggies, but feel they need more so that is why I am using the liquid poo. Lots of capeweed at the moment that I want to get rid off. (bad for horse) so that is getting pulled as dropped. dries out really quickly. I am thinking i might add chopped lucerne to my liquid poo. It has very deep roots and so should bring up minerals from deep.
     
  6. Bryant RedHawk

    Bryant RedHawk Junior Member

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    You can add both the Capeweed and Lucerne to your tea brewer, that will add minerals and more nitrogen compounds. If you happen to know any cattle men in your area you might try getting some of the chips from their fields, those are always good for teas.
    I'm getting ready to start a new barrel just for blueberries and saskatoons (serviceberries) that will include sulfates and sulfides so that tea will be my acidic tea. It will have; cow, hog, chicken along with some sheep manures, chopped blackberry canes and sumac berries. I plan to do a two phase brew anaerobic then air infused.

    Like Songbird says, scrounge every organic material you can (even grocery store toss outs work great in tea brewing), you can even put tobacco in there which makes it an insect repellant.
     
  7. songbird

    songbird Senior Member

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    not good to spread tobacco mosaic virus...

    nicotine is a poison. i'd stay away from using tobacco juice in any form.
     
  8. Bryant RedHawk

    Bryant RedHawk Junior Member

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    Songbird is right, and if it weren't for my lab and being a chemist/ biologist I would also be saying don't do it. Tobacco steeped in water is a very effective poison, killing good and bad insects, something I'm sure none of us want to do. I work hard to keep from harming beneficial insects, we have many different species of them on our land so our usual method of insect control is pick and squish, DE is our primary treatment on plants and even then only used when certain bugs are overwhelming the pick and squish method to the point of starting to kill our plants

    I should have mentioned that when I use tobacco in a tea, it is eaten by the anaerobic bacteria, I never use fresh tobacco, the stuff I use comes from a store that every once in a while has a stale bag of pipe tobacco, which I can get at a fraction of the cost. I use this mostly in ceremonies since we bury tobacco, corn and cedar for certain rites. When I use this in making a tea it goes in after the anaerobic tea has been working for a week, the quantity is about a quarter cup to 50 gal. of working tea. Chemical analysis of the finished tea (4 weeks of brewing so 3 weeks after the tobacco is introduced) shows a truly insignificant amount of nicotine present (2.00 ppm). A test of 1/4 cup tobacco steeped in 30 gal. of water ran 158.593 ppm, my teas usually run 30 gal. of supernate so I think there are certain anaerobic bacteria breaking down the nicotine in my brew (when I make this particular one). I have yet to be able to identify what happens exactly but am working on identifying the bacteria(s) present in there and thus I should be able to identify which do the breaking down of the nicotine molecule.

    .
     
  9. Flatland

    Flatland Member

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    I've read that is good to add sugar or molasses to the brew. Does anyone do this?
    I've got some very small comfrey plants that I am going to use for making tea when they get bigger but at the moment they need every leave they have to grow. One of the local gardeners swears that he makes the best fertilizer by cramming ass many comfrey leaves as he can in a drum with a lid, nothing else. He lets it rot and gets a sludgy black liquid that he swears is liquid gold. Plan to try it
     
  10. Bryant RedHawk

    Bryant RedHawk Junior Member

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    I don't use it but the sugars would be food for the bacteria and any yeast that happened into the brew.

    Comfrey has so many uses it boggles the mind that not everyone grows it.
    It will heal open wounds, the leaves decompose into a super fertilizer, it will heal the gut, ward off infections, and on and on and on. I call it the wonder plant because it has so many uses, some I'm sure have not been rediscovered yet. I would bet we have lost a great deal of information on this plant since there were several books on it and other healing herbs lost in the destruction of the Library of Alexandria that were kept no where else on earth at that time.
     
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  11. Flatland

    Flatland Member

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    All i can say to that is grow comfrey grow I have plans for you
     
  12. Brian D Smith

    Brian D Smith New Member

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    Flatland,
    My recommendation is to use biochar as a side dressing for your trees and plants with compost tea as an inoculate. I use sugar (molasses, old candy, spare cane sugar, etc) to feed the fungi and bacteria. I also add a bit of mycorrhizae to the tea. My favorite product is "Great White".
    The biochar provides a growing medium for the microbes and doesn't decompose out of the soil. You only have to add it once and it pretty much stays forever. Great on sandy soil.
     
  13. mischief

    mischief Senior Member

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    Bio dynamic methods talk about stirring the liquid (compost ) tea in such a way as to beat air back into it.
    It might be a good idea for you to check this out.
    I dont have horses but did have chooks and used to make a tea with their poop, seaweed and general weeds which were let rot down but occassionally stirred when I remembered to do it, especially just before I took some out to water down to use.
     
  14. Bryant RedHawk

    Bryant RedHawk Junior Member

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    Most of the "teas" made and being talked about in this thread are actually extractions, I do both extractions to build up minerals in the soil and I also brew aerated teas to add to the microbiome I am building in the soil. The aerated forms let me add bacterium, fungi, and higher life form critters such as springtails and nematodes. The draw back is that you have to brew for around 48 hours then use the brewed tea pretty quickly after that so the microorganisms are active, if you wait longer with this type of "tea" the microbiome you grew will either die or begin to go dormant again, dormant isn't a huge problem since a rain or watering of the treated area will wake them back up.
     
  15. Ian

    Ian New Member

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    Out of all the plants we grow, the dogs head straight for the Comfrey plants and eat a few leaves, that has to tell you something
     
  16. Ian

    Ian New Member

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    I use a solar powered pond aerator when making liquid fertilizer, keeps the smell down
     

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