If there is one thing that a farm produces if they have livestock is manure! Here is a more detailed post on it but in a nut shell for our current livestock

My Critters average daily output right now

• Horse’s- 100 pounds per day
• Fowl -11 pounds per day

That’s before bedding, so we have loads and i do mean loads of horse manure, now the good news is that i offered it up to fellow local gardeners to come bring their buckets, tubs and feed bags in a swap of time to clean up and if they wanted to gift me something back that would be amazing! I will share on a different post on sometime that came in trade in the best way!

Now if you have been following the blog for years, you have seen me talk about my season extending Manure heated and how amazing my big old horse trough works and it will be in use this year its 14th year but its going to be a nursery bed for young fruit bushes/trees cuttings. I am quite excited about using it in this way at least for the spring till they are rooted enough to be shifted over to true grow pots or air pruning tree seedling beds. I want to build at least one air pruning tree seedling bed as I want to grow my peach seedlings for sale on a yearly base.

I wanted to add two more raised beds behind the deck to increase the growing area of the kitchen garden but they needed to be moveable/shifted if need for at some point coming repair work, so we had gotten two of these small horse troughs on a sale years ago, and they are on wheels/with a wooden bottom, they have been used for everything from chick starting brooder to tree seedling grow out and more

This year they are getting shifted over and placed out into two new raised beds but they are being done manure/compost both for heat but also for as a farm, a very frugal way indeed to fill them

The first layers are winter aged horse manure and then bedding and last but not least, we have a years worth of coffee grounds in buckets, these ones have been winter aged and we used four of the large ice cream size for that layer, in total the trough is 3/4th full of layers.

This was well watered to get the first heating started, the pour off was collected and diluted for feeding the drip lines of some of our coming fruit trees. This weekend, will be our first dig though the layers and turning with more water added and then the cover will be placed over it again to increase the solar heating combined with the compost heat, two more weeks of heat/water/cover and turn and ideally the first highest heats will be done to the point i can level, cover it with a foot plus of good garden soil and it will be ready for the season.

The second one is still froze in and will be a bit before we can get it out and started, i expect i will need to start it with more layers of already finished or semi finished compost to help with volume or depending on how fast it does melt out, i can have it ready for mid may, where the one above i want it in play for end of april.

It will be lovely to have the expanded planting space so close to the house, and the rain barrel catchment on that side of the steel roof but also within easy access to the outdoor tap as well if needed. This area of the garden will get full sun and a micro climate with the house to the back on one side and a couple lines of tree breaks that any wind has to come though the food forest before its getting to this area. Should be a powerhouse for growing!

In total it will bring me up to three horse troughs gardens, it is getting hard to find the metal ones as folks locally have been buying the big rubber ones and so these can more and more rare to find, plus they send them for metal scrap instead of thinking others might like them.. Still i will be keeping a eye out at all the farm sales locally!