Fresh manure

Is it any use, apart from for piling up to become rotted manure?

Hairyloon wrote:Is it any use, apart from for piling up to become rotted manure?

A bit late for a reply I realise, but just in case its useful for someone else, you can use fresh manure as the basis for a "hot frame" or "hot box". Think of it as a cold frame sitting on top of a box of manure!

The basic layout is that you build a large wooden box with a door in one side into which the fresh poop can be shovelled. Above the box you have a wooden lid (or sometimes a fine zinc mesh) with another, usually not as high wooden box with sloping edges on two sides, topped off with a old window pane that can be opened. In the top box you put plants that you want to give a bit of "bottom heat" to help root and/or protect from a bit of frost (not the really, really tender ones - just the ones that are just slightly tender).

As the fresh manure in the bottom box starts to rot, it heats up, and that heat travels up through the "floor" into the top part of the box with the plants in it. On warm days you'll have to open the window to ventilate it, as it can get quite warm. Over time the manure loses its freshness and the heat from the rotting process dies down, so it is shovelled out and replaced with a new fresh supply (the rotted stuff then going off for normal garden use). The Victorian kitchen gardens sometimes did these on a grand scale with large hoppers built into the lower walls of long glass houses, half inside under the staging and half outside for loading/emptying. Of course they had a plentiful and constant supply of horse manure, and garden boys to shift it! :-)

If you don't have a supply of fresh manure, you can still do something similar by building a coldframe into the top of a large compost bin. If you build up a decent layered contents with a good mix of greens and browns, you'll generate a fair bit of heat whilst its composting. I've seen commercial versions of this in various gardening comics, but if you're handy with the saw, hammer and have a supply of pallet wood going begging it should be a relatively simple bit of "allotment engineering".

..Or grab a couple of bales...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/gardening/gardeningadvice/3349686/Gardening-blood-sweat-and-HLM.html I'm giving this a go this season

I'm afraid I just bung manure in a pile and wait... never been terribly technical

Hi Jim *waves*

Hurling at visiting Tory dignitaries?

I remember Mr Beasley doing this on Bob the Builder

... Making a hot bed to grow pineapples, that is, not hurling fresh manure at visiting Tories. Though the latter could have formed the basis for an interesting episode. I'm sure the kids would have loved it.

When I move the birds from their summer to winter accommodation, I spread the chicken manure and litter on my garlic beds as a winter mulch - let itdecay slowly under the snow - well thats the plan - this winter we have no snow cover..