Uses for horse muck in the garden?

[Esther.R]

I have an endless supply and year round supply of large quantities of horse muck from our lot.

So what can I do with it? I added a load to some of our veg beds at the back end of the summer ready for next year (not using them for root veg). What else can I do with it? Can I for instance make plant food from it (I seem to have inadvertantly created a sort of manure tea in a wheelbarrow I left out with muck in and it made me wonder whether I could use it as a liquid plant food?)

Other than that it cannot be used fresh and needs to rot for at least 6 months and that beds for root veg shouldn't be manured is there anything else I should know?

Seems a shame to have it all sitting there rotting down with nothing to do with most of it. Are there more uses that I am missing?

This is pure poo with very little bedding (summer it is picked from the fields, winter the big horses are on hard standing outside - this being Shetland and there being no fields hard enough for them to winter on - and rubber matting with very little bedding).

[Annpan]

I remember there being talk on here before about manure tea as a plant food.

You can also grow pumpkins, butternut squash, melons in fresh manure (again from another recent conversation on here) Just pile it up and stick in the seeds. You can use it the following year for the other beds.

I think you can burn it on a woodburner - but it would need to be really dry, baked by the sun probably not sure if that would happen in Shetland.

You could use it to heat water, by running a pipe through a rotting pile.

You can use it for methane collection, if you really have that much it might not be such a crazy idea.

[Esther.R]

Ahh, thanks. It isn't all in a giant pile as horses in a couple of different places so might not be able to use it for those things that need a single big muck heap (but will definitely bear that in mind if that changes) and we have a rented house (but hoping to buy eventually - fingers crossed!), but the other uses are good - not sure whether it will ever stay dry enough to bake the muck dry though..we have plenty of fine weather but not particularly hot and everything blows across quickly so we can get all the seasons in a day :D Was thinking of trying squashes this year

[Thurston Garden]

I make muck tea - a bucket full of fresh much in an old tattie bag (a hessian one) - tie the top with a long string and dunk in a barrel, drum or other suitable container for a couple of weeks. Tie the long string to something so u can fish the 'tea bag' out.

I dilute this quite heavily - I put a couple of pints in the bottom of a standard watering can and top up with water. I have some in bottles undiluted left from last year too. I bet you could spray it as a foliar feed and it might deter some nasties into the bargain - I use sea weed extract for that though.

Difficult to say how good it is - I should leave one plant un-fed as a control!

[Mare Owner]

A friend collects all her horse manure into one big heap. She waters it and turns it with a tractor and once it's done composting, she puts an ad in the paper. People come from all over to get the free compost, and they ask for tips to help pay for a bobcat machine they use to load trucks for people. Works great!

If you have smaller piles, you can still compost it down and have people come and shovel into their own buckets or bags. Or use old feed bags and bag youself and sell for small fees.