2023 garden season
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a Merry Christmas to all my AS gardening friends!! plenty of weeds in the garden of life, but Christmas Day always seems to help smooth things out! my last harvest of home grown lima beans was a winner! very tasty!! tasty like u just cannot buy at the store! 
i had been a bit worried, i had heard some rumors... but, in the end seems they both got out early on... good behavior! ~
plenty of work in the garden to do. got my brussel sprouts in and now my pea patch is exploding!... peain' (lol) all over the place. sugar snaps are ready to pick! film at 11 -
Starting another experiment for next year. I was gathering eggs the other day and got to looking at all the poop under the roost. Now I have been using manures in the garden all my life. I use wood shaving inside the coop to keep the mess and smells down. I usually just shovel out the shavings and dump either inside the lot or I dump them in the compost pile. Chicken poop and wood chips turns to compost very fast just dumped in a pile. Well, I decided to try a little different approach for this next season. I have started raking all the fresh poop in a pile and placing inside a tub. I am getting mostly poop, but also some chips. The tub is inside the coop so it stays dry. I plan on just spreading it in the garden rows when planting. I am thinking the wood chips will eat up the nitrogen of the poop preventing to much top growth and the nitrogen will speedup the wood breaking down and provide a steady supply of carbon. I get a good shovelfull of poop and shavings each morning under the roost ,which will add up by the time to plant, and doing this keeps the chickens from spreading the poop all over the coop and should keep the smells and flies down when weather warms up. It also means I aint stepping in poop when I gather eggs.
I think I'd dig that chicken manure in small pockets in your main compost pile to really get it cooking and then work the compost in the ground around crops you are trying to nurture.
How many five gallon buckets of manure per week are you getting?
It's great stuff for growing. For crops like watermelons or cantaloupe side-dressing the row the seedlings are being planted in makes much better use of the compost than spreading it over what may end up being a ten foot wide patch of vines. Working it in the ground where plant roots aren't going to be growing that season is a reduction in efficient utilization.
How many five gallon buckets of manure per week are you getting?
It's great stuff for growing. For crops like watermelons or cantaloupe side-dressing the row the seedlings are being planted in makes much better use of the compost than spreading it over what may end up being a ten foot wide patch of vines. Working it in the ground where plant roots aren't going to be growing that season is a reduction in efficient utilization.
I dont know Del. my compost pile is already pretty heavy in chicken manure. It breaks down pretty quick. I know the convential method is to mix the greens, manures and browns and keep them stirred to make compost, but I am lazy. I aint trying to make tons of compost, I only need a little bit for a very small area. As for how many buckets a week, maybe one if I scrape it clean. Three or four bucket full will cover the whole area. As for spreading it in the garden. the manure is mixed about half/half with wood chips. Now everybody knows chicken poop is high in nitrogen and wood chips takes lot of nitrogen to break down and will rob nitrogen from the soil if just added alone. I dont now how well this grand plan is going to work, but the test plot is very small.
I've used chicken manure and bedding straight from the coop to side dress corn. I hoed furrows about eight inches from the plant row on each side, spread the manure and covered the furrows. Seemed to work real well. These days I use a sump pump and a 55 gallon barrel with 45 gallons of water and 8 gallons of urine which I save up in milk jugs. I use a 150ft hose and water the plants heavily putting down all 55 gallons on four 50' rows. Works great and much easier than digging furrows. I do this at knee high and again at tassel stage.
Grows corn like gangbusters!
I use a more diluted mix for other crops like broccoli, squash, winter squash, okra, etc. I've got about 50 gallons saved up now.
Here's our short day onions Vidalia types about 225 plants in three 50 ft. rows 9 inches apart in a 3ft wide bed dug 14 inches deep using a broad fork that digs 14 inches deep x 20 inches wide. The onions are about 8 inches apart in the row spacing. They were small non dormant bulbs with tops when planted and I hit them with the 'juice' about ten days ago. We have 30 50ft X 3ft beds that are always in the same place. They have a stake at each end in their centers that I put a string on when digging and planting. We try our best to never walk in the beds.
Grows corn like gangbusters!
I use a more diluted mix for other crops like broccoli, squash, winter squash, okra, etc. I've got about 50 gallons saved up now.
Here's our short day onions Vidalia types about 225 plants in three 50 ft. rows 9 inches apart in a 3ft wide bed dug 14 inches deep using a broad fork that digs 14 inches deep x 20 inches wide. The onions are about 8 inches apart in the row spacing. They were small non dormant bulbs with tops when planted and I hit them with the 'juice' about ten days ago. We have 30 50ft X 3ft beds that are always in the same place. They have a stake at each end in their centers that I put a string on when digging and planting. We try our best to never walk in the beds.
we had a swell N Y E dinner last nite. a 'tip over!' as it was over the top! lol.... NY strips/tenders. and some items fresh out of the garden. everyone agreed the limas delish, and the peas n pots peas very sweet. but the star that stole the show was the sugar snaps that i sauteed! the strips n ckn were to die for, but imo... them sugar snaps gave 'em a good run for their $$! strips served on fresh arugula !
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picked 123123 ~
More or less what I have planned. One year I used horse poop to side dress my taters. My brother raised show horses and Had tons of manure mixed with chips. He kept it piled untill he had enough to spread on his fields. Anways. I had planted taters and hilled them pretty high. I took the manure and filled the middle of the rows to the top of the hills. I had footbabll size taters, but I also fought a battle with tater bugs. Worse infestation I had ever had. I also had a earthworm/ red wiggler infestation. The worms where actually boreing into the taters. I suspect that heavy layer of manure mixed with the wood chips must of been like a buffet to the worms and the bugs. That fall I tilled everything in and had tons of everything in the next garden.
jollygreengiant
ArboristSite Member
Well it looks like my 2023 garden is finally done. We had been abnormally warm for all of December but we finally got cold enough the last couple days where I think the kale is now dead. That's a record for us here.
Season been over since the great parsnip dig!! lol! Got some of the composted horse manure spread and plowed under last month, ( cant usually plow in Dec. here, Could plow today if needed! unreal! LOL!)
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