Stop and Smell the Manure !!!!

Category: Organic Tips for your Garden | Posted: Mon Apr 02, 2007 5:47 am

When I was very young, we lived on a farm in rural Scotland. My father looked after the animals and the crops and my mother would do the cooking and cleaning, making jams and jellies and other good things to eat. At that time, I was an only child and never had anyone of my own age to play with, and as a five year old, this, to me, was a problem.

To make me feel better, my parents bought me a doll carriage, all shiny and new, with white lace bedding and pillows. I only had one doll, so I pushed her around the garden for a while, talking to her as a five year old would do. But I was getting rather bored, as she never made any sound.

As I passed the chicken coop I had an inspirational idea. I opened the coop door (which I was not supposed to do) and looked for Molly, our biggest, oldest hen. I managed to lift her up and take her out of the coop and proceeded to dress her in my doll's shawl and bonnet. I then put her in my new doll carriage and was delighted when she seemed not to mind this new form of transport.

I happily pushed her around the yard for quite some time. When I spoke to her she would cock her head to one side and cluck at me. This appealed to me more than my silent doll companion. What I did not know was, as she was "talking" to me from one end of her body, she was doing something else from the other end! I only found this out when I had tired of the game and lifted her out of the carriage. To my horror, I saw this messy, stinky, mess on my lovely white lace bedding!!

This was my first close encounter with "manure". As I became a gardener, I realized just how valuable manure would be in my life. It was to become like liquid gold, the answer to healthy green plants.

In my novice days, I ordered manure from the local farmer. When he came with a tractor load and dumped in on my front lawn, it was just fresh. If you've been close to fresh manure, you will know how revolting a smell it has. So there I was, taking wheelbarrow loads of this "stuff" for days, to get rid of the odor. It seemed to penetrate my clothes even after they had been washed.

Then I got smarter and wiser, learning that old manure is the right thing for the garden. I now make manure "tea". If you take a large bucket and suspend a long pole over the top, get a porous bag, fill it with manure and hang the manure bag over the bucket, then when it rains, the manure gets liquefied. Then you can drain it off into a smaller pail and put it on your garden as fertilizer. No matter how much money you spend on fertilizer, it will never give you the benefits of "liquid gold".

If you know a farmer or know where there is a horse farm, ask for the scrapings of old manure from the barn floor and hold your nose while transporting it to your home. You will reap the benefits ten fold.

So my first encounter with manure as a child was an unpleasant one (especially as in THOSE days you could receive a spanking, and sitting down was painful for a while), but I didn't know then how much I would rely on this 'smelly, messy stuff' to produce wonderfully scented flowers.

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katsback wrote on Mon Apr 02, 2007 1:04 pm:

nice to think about when you were a kid,i may try the manure tea too,thanks.

glendann wrote on Mon Apr 02, 2007 4:02 pm:

I learned very young how inportant chicken litter was to my mom.In the spring my dad would clean out the chicken house and scatter the litter over the garden and then take the disc and turn it under over and over
until he was sure it was mixed really well.that and horse and cow manure was their frrtilizer and boy did it grow veggies.