2025 gardens

[mike89]

I see today that my chives are popping up!!   have to get some cottage cheese!!!   

[glenn57]

I see today that my chives are popping up!!   have to get some cottage cheese!!!   

Nooooooo. Don't waste the chives!

[Bobberineyes]

while in Paynesville i picked up 4 20 LB bags or organic cow manure for my garden!!!!! 

So being organic you can blend it in the spring? From what I read is exactly what Dotch mentioned,  fall is best for manure spreading unless it doesn't matter with what you bought.

[Rookie]

 I get bags of manure also in the spring. Plus I make my own compost from last years leaves blended with fresh grass clippings all summer. Ready to put on in the fall.

I drove around town on cleanup day and picked up tubs people were throwing away. Drilled holes in the bottom and sides to let out water and in air. I have 7 of them in the back.

[glenn57]

while in Paynesville i picked up 4 20 LB bags or organic cow manure for my garden!!!!! 

So being organic you can blend it in the spring? From what I read is exactly what Dotch mentioned,  fall is best for manure spreading unless it doesn't matter with what you bought.

boober.....from what i see it's about the only thing places sell organic fertilizer. i got this stuff at fleet supply in Paynesville...menards has some chicken poo. not sure what FF has.

i used  to get fertilizer from a friend that has a farm just out of town.........yea it was sitting for a while, but good grief where there weeds in that stuff. this organic stuff doesnt seem to be filled with weeds.  and yes i put it on the garden a day or so before G tills it. this is year #2 with the cow stuff.....next year i'll switch it to the chicken poo!!
i bag a bunch of my maple leaves in the fall and when the time comes i lay them around my tomatoes peppers and cukes . by fall there gone so i do add leaves in the garden.  but i also throw all my banana peelings, tater peelings, pretty much all other stuff like that in my garden year round. even spent coffee grounds!   

[Scenic]

I hauled in 15 yards of 10 year old compost last fall to make some raised beds.  I am really hoping I don't have to fight weeds all summer too. 

[Rookie]

 Yeah, that's the thing about getting a pile of local manure. Lots of weeds. Also making the mistake of using hay instead of straw. A LOT of weed seeds.

[glenn57]

Yeah, that's the thing about getting a pile of local manure. Lots of weeds. Also making the mistake of using hay instead of straw. A LOT of weed seeds.

if i remember right, dotch also mentioned usung hay or straw and needing  to be careful in the event it had different types of  herbicides in it also!!
 
i found out the hard way years back going to the city spot and getting grass clippings that mostly came from the town baseball diamond that is a very manicured field!!!

[Dotch]

You got 'er glenn! 

This is the confusing part. All organic manure really means basically is the animals were reputedly fed using organic feedstuff and there shouldn't be any chemical residue from the bedding. I say reputedly, as from experience, organic can prove to be organic in name only. It's a little like "peer reviewed" scientific papers. One guy lies and three swear to it. There's no wholesale testing on any of this stuff. In a situation where you're buying bagged manure from a store however, they'd be fools to allow something harmful to creep thru the system. The resulting lawsuits would be staggering. My guess is too the store bought stuff has likely been composted or heated to kill the weeds and/or potential pathogens. If it was the fresh stuff, you'd know because it would stink to high heaven.

No doubt, getting manure from someone's farm operation is playing Russian roulette especially with weeds. A few years ago I got oat straw that wasn't underseeded with alfalfa and had been sprayed for broadleaves. Bright, pretty straw & there was nary a weed in it. My hay? Not so much. A few years before that, I got some straw from the Amish down in IA. The oats had been shocked and run through a threshing machine. The spike-tooth cylinder on the threshing machine really chewed the straw up and you could find loops of binder twine from the bundles in the straw. You could also find all the weeds and weed seeds in it. Pretty safe bet it was organic though! We used small square cornstalk bales for bedding this winter again. Pretty clean stuff and very absorptive as dry as it was. However, potential for some chemical residue issues if I've sprayed my pasture for Canada thistles. The chemicals, either aminopyralid or clopyralid, pass right on thru the sheep in the urine and feces and are deposited wherever they decide to relieve themselves. In the barn on the bedding? Starting to follow where this is going? To make matters worse, a lot of corn is also being sprayed with clopyralid as part of a premix herbicide package. It also stays in the cornstalks. While the concentration shouldn't be enough to bother soybeans at the rates used in the corn, add what's excreted from the sheep in the cornstalk bedding & suddenly the balance is tipped towards dinging the next year's soybean crop. This is concerning when the manure is spread on constalks the fall before & soybeans are planted the following spring. I killed a patch of the neighbor's beans doing that a few years back. It wasn't a large area but it was sure embarrassing as hell.         

[glenn57]

i'm not at all sold on anything labeled "organic" wether its fertilizer for the garden of the food i buy...as a matter of fact i go out of my way to not buy anything food related thats marked organic.....1 reason cost.

it seems the only fertilizer sold in bags at the store are always marked organic fer some reason. so i dont have much of a choice.

ya want good fertilizer.....find someone who raises rabbits!!!!! 

back in the golden days of FM i got to know some of the wemen on the womans thread over there quite well.  oh yea the thugs there well at least one told me to stay the hell outta da wemems form.....i told him to f$%^^ off.....quess what.....i got banned. 

anyway, back to what i was getting at, this gal was a bass nut, lived down by cottonwood and invited me to stop.........so....since i drive through cottonwood on my way to sioux falls i stopped. they organic farmed...... that was a dang interesting visit. there method of weed control was a humungust propane tank and they burnt the weeds between rows. they also needed all they own silos to store there grain. and nothing i think that was the outside about 100 ft was not considered organic.

there corn got shipped to new york to make organic vodka!!

[Bobberineyes]

while in Paynesville i picked up 4 20 LB bags or organic cow manure for my garden!!!!! 

So being organic you can blend it in the spring? From what I read is exactly what Dotch mentioned,  fall is best for manure spreading unless it doesn't matter with what you bought.

boober.....from what i see it's about the only thing places sell organic fertilizer. i got this stuff at fleet supply in Paynesville...menards has some chicken poo. not sure what FF has.

i used  to get fertilizer from a friend that has a farm just out of town.........yea it was sitting for a while, but good grief where there weeds in that stuff. this organic stuff doesnt seem to be filled with weeds.  and yes i put it on the garden a day or so before G tills it. this is year #2 with the cow stuff.....next year i'll switch it to the chicken poo!!
i bag a bunch of my maple leaves in the fall and when the time comes i lay them around my tomatoes peppers and cukes . by fall there gone so i do add leaves in the garden.  but i also throw all my banana peelings, tater peelings, pretty much all other stuff like that in my garden year round. even spent coffee grounds!

I get all that,  do the same but my garden as we speak has an inch of mulched leaves and grass that'll get turned in a month,  heck I gots a bag of egg shells that'll go under some plants.  From what I read last year and Dotch explained twice in the last page, fall is best fer manure is all I'm saying. I'll stick to that..

[glenn57]

If it works for go for it! you till it in also in fall??

Oh and I'd suggest be careful with some other advice he gives in other categories!

[Dotch]

You get an "A" boober! It ain't rocket surgery or I wouldn't be doing it... It's too bad glenn doesn't recognize fine quality cutlery until someone gives him some...

A lot of the organic people do an excellent job glenn. It's the bad eggs who cheat that give them a black eye. Those weed flamers are really fun to watch especially at nite. Always smells like someone has a grass fire burning probably because they sorta do. The zappers, using electricity generated from a high powered generator & tractor are a real trip. They work best on larger broadleaf weeds where the weeds are significantly taller than the crop. At nite it almost looks like something out of a science fiction movie. I'm certainly not opposed to reducing the amount of chemical being used in our cropping systems. Using them prophylactically as we have all too often is a recipe for disaster in more ways than one. Round Up Ready crops created far more issues than they ever solved, especially once the technology was abused. If they'd known enough to stop at Round Up Ready soybeans they might've had a fighting chance but they didn't. Many of us were warning them not to insert the trait into corn. Monsatan's response: "Dead weeds don't develop resistance!" Um, what about selection pressure? The rest is history. Now it's almost like playing whack a mole. Weeds get resistant to glyphosate so we throw something else at it, often times some of the same things we were using before Round Up Ready crops were a reality. They get resistant to that so we try something else and guess what? SSDD. Retirement is sounding better all the time.       

[Rookie]

 One thing about manure......DO NOT put it where you plant potatoes. Manure can lead to scab. I learned the hard way.

How to reduce the risk of scab:
Avoid excessive manure: If you're concerned about scab, reduce or avoid heavy applications of fresh manure, especially if you have light-textured soils.

 

[Bobberineyes]

If it works for go for it! you till it in also in fall??

Oh and I'd suggest be careful with some other advice he gives in other categories!

Naw, my garden is only 10×24, usually late fall I'll spread 3 bags thinly before covering with chopped leaves. But my fence stays up to keep the pooches out until it's tilled.