People here using horse manure in greenhouse hotbeds?

[Joel_BC]

A recent post on the greenhouse-heat thread has reminded me of the horse manure hotbed method. Our neighbor down the hill keeps two riding horses, and I've though maybe she'd be willing to sell or trade for some early-stage horse manure for us to make hotbeds with.

To anyone keeping horses (or getting manure from neighbors) who may also keep a greenhouse: how green is the horse manure that you use in your GH? Do you use the freshest stuff off the pile? Or stuff that's been aged for a week or two? Or...?

Do you find the biological heat from the composting manure helps to heat the general climate of your GH? ... enough to extend your fall season as temps move toward winter?

What about an abundance of weed seeds introduced via the manure?

Other comments or tips?

 

[Corn Woman]

I don't use it in the green house but I love it for the garden and prefer it over most all manure except rabbit because pampered horses actually any horse should have a higher quality feed and I have less weed problems for that reason. The worst manure for weeds in my garden is from sheep.

 

[Joel_BC]

I don't use it in the green house but I love it for the garden and prefer it over most all manure except rabbit because pampered horses actually any horse should have a higher quality feed and I have less weed problems for that reason. The worst manure for weeds in my garden is from sheep.

Thanks for the reply, Corn Woman. On the weeds aspect, I was just thinking of the comparison between cattle manure and horse. I agree, though, that in the outdoor garden we've found horse manure to be the nicest, easiest to work with. But we've had to buy or trade for cattle or horse manure. In the garden, we've used various organic sources of nutrients... horse, cattle, or sheep manure, cover crops of fall rye or field peas, spreadings of alfalfa meal.

When we originally mixed the soil in our GH raised beds, we used some local sedge peat (around 40%), mixed with sandy soil from our land (30%), and with rotted manure (30%). We've since added a lot of nutrients like rock powders and bagged organic-nutrient mixtures to these beds. They've been very productive - but, the manure content was never high enough nor fresh enough to cause heating in the beds.

With all the folks here who keep horses, I thought for sure there'd be someone who had used fairly fresh horse manure in GH beds for heat, as well as nutrition of the soil.

 

[Corn Woman]

Sounds like some beautiful soil Joel_BC, I have a friend that uses fresh horse manure in his greenhouse and uses my bantam chickens to do the work of turning it for him. It does heat up enough that he can plant in our cold winters and get good germination. He usually waits about 6 weeks to plant to ensure that the manure is not too "hot". Seems to work well for him because he uses no other supplemental heat and is able to grow enough cool weather crops for his family plus many others all winter long. He swears horse manure is the only way to go. I know that he mixes it with mushroom compost as well.