[diggerjoe]

Finally the dreaded bsd manure is affecting the plot, thankfully only in areas. But. last weekend I made my usual sweetcorn bed of well dug soil covered with a layer of manure ( none before) and topped off with weed fabric. I then plant through slits. Any way the bed next to it was for runners, no manure since end of last year. If I have contaminated manure do you think I could take off the weedfabric and rake all manure onto the runner bed ( are you still with me!) and perhaps an inch or two of soil with it, recover and use this for sweetcorn and use the cleared bed for runners. Would the contaminated manure have leached into the soil over a week?. Long winded sorry for that. I have a lot of runners to go in and I am running short of space?

[woodburner]

I presume you are referring to pyralid contamination?

It binds to the lignin (carbon compound) in the plant material and is released again as the lignin breaks down. Soil bacteria break down the pyralid, and what may have leached out of the manure, will have been brought into intimate contact with the soil, so should be broken down really quickly.
I'd test first before moving it around, but that's cos I'm a wimp.
If you have runners to spare, you could use some of them to test for contamination before deciding where to plant the rest of them. I'm not sure how long they would need for you to tell if it's safe or not though. I'm sure there's info on testing around here somewhere . . .


Alliums are also unaffected, (onions, garlic, leeks).


'ang on!  Reading your post again: "Runner bed has had no manure since end of last year." So that should be ok even if it was contaminated.
"Sweetcorn bed . . . . manure" Sweetcorn is a grass so unaffected by pyralid, I thought that was why you planted it in the manured bed.
Seems to me so far that you don't have a problem . . .

[diggerjoe]

Think panic mode has set in since two rows of my druid potatoes were affected ) manured early spring) and I was looking forward to those. I will take soil from the bed and pot up some beans and see what happens.

[mountainvicar]

So are there still problems with the bags of farmyard manure brought from garden centers?

P.S. Im using J Arthur Bowers Blended Farm Manure

[diggerjoe]

The infected manure on our site is from local stables. I had bought some bags of Levingtons Farmyard manure earlier this year to use for my tomatoes. So far they seem to be ok in that in fact they are big strong plants they are obviously enjiying it. I think we shall see this problem hanging around a good while. I can hear my old dad saying there's nothing better than home made compost and little growmore if needed. I think he was right!