[binner]

right here goes, bear in mind my plot is only two seasons old it was grass untill then and as im still digging some over my crop rotation is a bit out of line but next year it will all fall into place.
i have dug over a large area for the brassicus and manured it, i did this first as it will then get longer to settle and be firmer when i plant, my potatos are going in where i had leeks onions and a few carrots and parsnips this year BUT i have run out of well rotten horse manure, i used what i had on the brassicus bed, so what can i put on the beds to feed the tatties??? i can get as much fresh horse manure as i like or would i be better adding cheep bags of compost or buying bags of manure from garden centre or use something like chicken maure pellets? i do have a huge compost heap made up of everything from the plot plus lots of maure but i am still adding too it now and planning on using this the year after, come spring i will start another heap for the year afer that

[Zippy]

I am moving over from using any animal input to using composts and manures of purely vegetable origin.  Other gardeners on here (and this is not a criticism at all - each to their own) seem to consider that compost is for soil conditioning whereas animal manure is for soil feeding, as though compost lacks body or something that compost cannot provide.

I do not prescribe to this view and consider that vegetable compost can and if properly built does contain for richer and more diverse quantities of nutrients and is more readily utilised by the micro-organisms and earthworms already present in the soil.  I am going more over to the idea of feeding the soil rather than the plants in it as a way of gardening for the long haul rather than feeding for the season's veggies.

So long as you do not go disturbing the natural soil strata by constant  digging over (apart from initial soil preparation when you first take over your plot) and rotovation, then you do not need much compost once you get things going.

Besides, lawn mowings, hay and autumn leaves are far nicer to pack your car with than animal poo!

Give it some thought. It is not the only way to do things but I would argue that it is a more sustainable method.

[compostqueen]

Your soil should be quite fertile as it's not been used for growing crops before. I wouldn't go buying anything to put on it other than manure or manure pellets which you can get from your lotty shop. You can use comfrey leaves too if you have nothing else when it comes to planting time

The manure doesn't have to be rotted!  Spuds will grow in fresh muck just fine.  Folks let it rot a bit as it's less messy to handle than from fresh. If you got some now you could lay it out on the spud bed and leave it overwinter and it should be ok by the time you come to plant your spuds. It will have had time to mature a bit

[JayG]

There is some great information about fertilisers and manures on this very site:

http://www.allotment-garden.org/fertilizer/npk-manures-compost.php

(Also note the blue links at the bottom of the page which take you to much more "how to" advice.)

NPK analysis is useful information but you need to take into account the fact that it represents the percentage of each "essential" nutrient by weight; compost and manures may seem quite low in nutrients but are generally applied in far greater quantities than dry chemical fertilisers.

Zippy is right in that there is not a huge difference between the nutrient content of most animal manures and home-made compost, so they are both excellent soil improvers and provide useful (but not huge) amounts of plant foods.

Soils vary a great deal though; despite using as much home-made compost as I could make I experienced several relatively poor years growing vegetables on my plot because nutrients are leached out of my sandy soil very quickly. Loam or clay gardeners may well fare better but I have to add additional fertilisers to my soil during the growing season to get good crops.

[mumofstig]

spread the fresh horse manure where you will put the potatoes, by spring it will no longer be fresh, and most of it will have been taken down into the soil by the worms anyway

[Zippy]

I once had it put to me from a veganic gardener, who had succesfully produced abundant and heathy veggies for over five years on the plot without any animal manures or by products (no BFB) at all, that in the wilds thre would not be anywhere near the amount of muck dropped by wild animals compared to the amount we drop on our plots, so animal manures were unneccesary.

However, nature doesn't produce the same amount of veggies per square foot in the wilds compared to our intensive plots, so do we actually need to be heaping more mnaure on to keep up with the nutrient demand? Having thought this one through, I am thinking that what we need is not more animal products but more vegetable composts, green manures and mulches like hay and lucerne which have similar amounts of nutrients, are nicer to handle, avoid animal exploitation and break down slower than animal manures and so maintain the heart of the soil for much longer, providing they are layered on top of an undisturbed soil strata - that is, not dug and inverted.

Its a challenge to the traditions of allotment gardening I know - but it works once you have cleaned the ground of perrenials.

as you can probably tell - I'm sold!

[zazen999]

I made the mistake of using manure earlier this year - big error. 

So once it had all been shovelled off my plot - I'm sticking to good old fashioned home made compost and composts of a vegetable origin.

I got great veg before any of that disgusting stuff came onto my plot and once it had gone, things grew well again.

[Zippy]

zazen -you're actually going to the length of scraping the stuff back off? I made the same mistake of loading about 50 stone of the stuff onto my potato bed (40 square feet) and it has partially been worked in by worms and i have another two compost bins layered with animal muck and vegetable matter so it will be after next year I go manure free and I suppose another year or so after that before I can say the crops I am producing are purely down to veganic methods. It is a move I feel confident about though.

[zazen999]

zazen -you're actually going to the length of scraping the stuff back off? I made the same mistake of loading about 50 stone of the stuff onto my potato bed (40 square feet) and it has partially been worked in by worms and i have another two compost bins layered with animal muck and vegetable matter so it will be after next year I go manure free and I suppose another year or so after that before I can say the crops I am producing are purely down to veganic methods. It is a move I feel confident about though.

I had to it was contaminated with Aminopyralid - we had 4 builders bags full of it and a farmer came and shovelled it all away. Worst decision we ever made....never again.

I should have listened to my instincts and stayed with the veg based approach.

2 beds where it had been really dug in are being left fallow with just green manures on them for a year; to try and clean the soil up. 

[Zippy]

Actually i thought about what i had posted earlier and realised it wasn't all bad. Bed 1 was mucked heavily last year, Bed 2 has just been heavily mucked as I mentioned, but beds 3 and 4 have never been mucked in my keeping and before me there was a polytunnel and I know the guy never manured the topsoil.

Therefore i will be able to compare the potatoes on heavily mucked soil this year against a veg based top dressing of my own compost, leafmould, seaweed and lawn mowings on Bed 3 next year; so I can make good of a bad situation.

The grass mowings - a Peugeot 206 full each time - come from a friend who has two goats roaming an acre of meadow grass and she cuts the grass without picking up the manure so the grass mowings come naturally manure rich as they would have in the wild. The grass is quite wirey so it rots down without going mushy like Perrenial Ryegrass for example.  I can blend this with her hens' spent wood shavings bedding to make an incredible top dressing without worrying about collecting large animal manures (which tend to be heavy with water) or aminopyralid.

[binner]

thanks for the help, sorry its late iv been at work late most of week

zippy that sure does give me something to think about but for now i was just wanting a quick fix for next year tatties,
comfrey has just been potted up this week so i dont think i will have any for next year, i think il move the whole compost heap into the empty heap space at the side of it and see what its like at the bottom failing that then il just stick a few manure pellets on them

[Zippy]

For a quick fix you could try doing the rounds of your friends for last of the year lawn mowings - which may have autumn leaves chopped up in with the mix for a good Carbon to Nitrogen ratio and just cover the plot to be potatoes, plant your seed potatoes in spring and just keep tipping those lawn mowings on in spring making sure you don't pile them on too fast or high, which will cause them to heat up.

The only thinkg to watch is that your friends do not use weedkillers on their lawn which may affect your veggies.

A quick maturing compost could be a combination of grass mowings, pet bedding (soiled wood shavings and hay), torn up newspaper and coffee grounds from Starbucks - they are glad to get rid of coffee grounds and if you make it known, will tip it straight into a bin bag for you rather than dressing them up in a foil bag.

If you start to build this now in a separate bin to your big stuff, it should be ready to use by spring 2011.

Good luck with whatever you decide.