horse manure

[grahamhobbs]

Extremely unlikely that timber for sawdust for bedding would be from 'treated' timber, joinery shops use untreated timber, treated timber is for carpentry on building sites. Also you would not use 'sawdust' from MDF (which used to have formaldehyde in it but doesn't anymore) because it produces a fine dust as against shavings.
Yes timber shavings would on their own take nitrogen out of the soil if added 'neat'. Therefore need to leave with the manure to rot down a bit first before putting on the soil.

[Peggy Sue]

The Aminopyralid problem affected me for 1 year, the farmer sprayed the fields without me knowing and I lost all my tomatoes as a result

Nothing is ever easy as they say...

Having said that this year I hedged my bets, put some toms in manure based compost (home made), some in growbags, some down the allotment, some in my rubbish home garden soil.

The ones in the home compost are HUGE but the tomatoes were less plentiful and slower to ripen.
The growbags showed all teh amino pyralid signs to start with, then reovered, then showed Mg deficiency, then recovered, then possible slight blight, recoved and have had a lovely crop.
The lovely allotment were abundant, very early, got blight but survivied and contiued to give loads of fruit.
The rubbish home soil have looked the healthiest of all and had least TLC, but am still waiting for any toms to actually ripen

So the moral of the story is- hedge your bets as often as you can!!

[Peggy Sue]

Extremely unlikely that timber for sawdust for bedding would be from 'treated' timber, joinery shops use untreated timber, treated timber is for carpentry on building sites. Also you would not use 'sawdust' from MDF (which used to have formaldehyde in it but doesn't anymore) because it produces a fine dust as against shavings.
Yes timber shavings would on their own take nitrogen out of the soil if added 'neat'. Therefore need to leave with the manure to rot down a bit first before putting on the soil.

Mostly horse bedding is 'shavings' rather than sawdust....this is slightly different I think and they do treat some bedding products (some of which are shavings based) to reduce dust and prevent horses eating it. It is often softwood shavings and I know in industry you ahve to have special extract procedures for dust from softwood due to carcenogenic risks, so since it's waste material it would always be difficult I guess to guarentee the source so I have assumed the worst- very happy to be prooved wrong and hope so for the sake of stabled horses.

As for the rotting down I know straw's critical time is about 18 months, no idea for wood but I assumed longer (to be fair without any real knowledge ) it may be shorter. But normally weeds are a problem less than a year anyway. Maybe the London horses don't get to eat much grass so hence weeds are less of a problem.

Certainly stabled horse muck has the advantage of the added pee which I don't get from wantering round the field collecting, however my pumpkins said thankyou regardless

[Millymollymandy]

I've found straw rots down really quickly - well more quickly than 18 months. Now that we've finally got the last lot of compost with too much sawdust in it rotted (after about 2.5 years and lots of turning with copious amounts of grass clippings added ) my compost is doing fine and turning around in a year and it's mostly green stuff mixed with straw and duck and chook poop.

Your tomato experiment has yielded interesting results, PSue.