Having access to an essentially unlimited supply of bunny turds, and can say, with confidence, that bunny dodo works rather well also.
Oh-- I almost forgot this one-- we used to have a guinea pig, and when we cleaned the dirty shavings out of his cage, we’d dump them on the flowerbed. The tulips loved it.
A better demonstration of why we still need the apostrophe to show the possessive could not be found.
My grandparents were dairy farmers, and they used cow manure on their corn (which was used to feed the cows) and maybe their alfalfa. They had two forms–the more solid type from cleaning out stalls, and a more liquid sludge that was collected from a huge tank (which had an open top, so maybe it was more liquid from rain water). The origin of that stuff was the gutters in the barn—the gutters would clean themselves and it would get piped into the tank.
Thats a pretty unique story, I wish I had ice-breakers like that.
Well I think i’ve been educated to the fullest on this one. No more please. No, honestly, thats enough.
- better demonstration of why we still need the apostrophe to show the possessive could not be found.*
I just noticed that myself, too…
“Why is horse-dung good to put on plants’ soil, but not other animals?” Because it’s hard for the other animals to get the horse crap out of their fur.
Behold Milorganite!
In high school I was an aggie. I remember Mr. Holmes my ag teacher saying that one reason horse manure is better than cow manure is because horses do not eat as much salt as cows. Salt is leached out of the soil in the desert to allow plants to grow. (note: I grew up in the Imperial Valley, Calif which is a desert reclamation area)
I suppose this thread is an indication of how few people have a connection with the land. Animal manure, and in parts of Europe and Asia, any manure, is a valuable fertilizer. The right to have manure deposited on your crop ground was sufficiently important that efforts by the local knight to have the peasants’ oxen graze his fallow ground instead of all the fallow land was a substantial cause of discontent. In the agricultural Midwest the early spring before planting and the late fall after harvest is the occasion for a regular gala of manure spreading. There are of course many ecological side effects when dealing with large quantities of manure, especially liquid hog manure–if it gets into a waterway the stuff will quickly deplete the oxygen in the water and raise hell with fish and other aquatic critters. The stuff also has fairly high levels of ammonia too.
Horses do not digest very well, having small single chambered stomach, and need large quantities of low nutrition forage like grass hay. Because the horse’s digestion is so inefficient a fair amount of stuff passes through essentially unaltered. Often a healthy stand of oats will spring up in a horse manure pile-the seed goes right through the horse and germinates in the pile. Horse manure is not as concentrated as cow, pig and chicken manure, it has lower levels of ammonia and higher fiber content than the other common livestock manures and is therefore not as “hot.” Horse manure can be safely put on plants that would scald with more concentrated manures. Because of the heat produced by the rotting half digested vegi matter in horse manure and because of the many small air spaces in the fibrous mass it was banked up around house foundations in the old days as insulation.
Horse manure is the sovereign remedy for worn out asparagus beds. Just take off a half a foot of soil, pile in the horse droppings, water and wait until spring.
Because the other animals might not like it?
[sorry, couldn’t restrain it]