Posts Tagged ‘composting manure’
Steaming Cold
Yesterday morning we awoke to double-digit below-zero temperatures. It was probably the coldest night we have left the horses outside to endure. They did have their blankets on, and despite significant frost on their faces from their breath and some nasty snow/ice buildup on the bottoms of their hooves, they seemed to have handled it fine.
I experienced another first when I decided to see if I could to anything to help Legacy with the excessive buildup under his front hooves. After locating a hoof pick in Cyndie’s tray of tools, I stepped up and invited him to lift his foot for me.
Based on my vague memory of watching our farrier, George Walker, I maneuvered to hold Legacy’s leg between my knees. He seemed to welcome my efforts and was very accommodating of my untrained technique. It is probably best to have another person to handle the horse for this procedure, but he and I were the only ones available. We made due.
The whole chunk wouldn’t pop off like I’d hoped, so I scraped and scratched as best I was able to grind it down to a less severe knob. Legacy stood stationary after I finished that first hoof, so I took that as a sign of approval and walked around to repeat my performance on the other side. Other than his leaning excessively to the point of scaring me he was going to topple over, it went about the same as the first one. He seemed satisfied with the partial progress.
On a whim, I tried to see if I could get any good pictures of the ice crystal formations that grew on piles of manure. I thought the juxtaposition of the two might produce and interesting result.
It was steaming hot for a little while.
Surprisingly, the extreme cold doesn’t stop the biological processes at work in the compost pile, so the crystal growth gets a lot more substantial. That small mountain of manure is cooking and the steam rises all night long.
I was hoping to get a good image from the main pile, but it was probably too cold overnight and the ice accumulation grew so thick it got beyond the delicate beauty I was wanting to capture. Of course, that didn’t stop me from trying.
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When all the morning chores were done and Delilah and I had finished our breakfast, I made an extra trip back down to check on the horses. I had spoken with George about the ice buildup and confirmed I was doing the right thing. Emboldened, I wanted to see if I could help any of the other horses.
They were all napping in the sun. I sat on the ground with them for about a half an hour, soaking up the cold sunshine and enjoying the serenity with them. They didn’t need any further intervention from me.
By the afternoon, it looked like they had all successfully shed the accumulation that was stuck to them in the morning. A much better solution than my trying to do it for them.
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Fertilizer happens
In about a month we will reach the point of having had our 4 horses for one year. No matter how much reading and planning we could do for manure management, it is nothing like actually seeing and dealing with the real thing. For the uninitiated, a 1000 pound horse can produce around 50 lbs of manure a day. We now have an idea of what that is really like.
The storage and distribution system I naively devised over time worked adequately for this first year, going from having none at all to a year’s-worth. Now we are approaching the point of starting the second year with a lot less open storage space. It is roughly half-filled with composting manure right now.
There are some refinements to my system of manure management that I hope to accomplish. My effort to thoroughly compost is forcing me to rethink my methods and may require some expansion of space to store ‘in-process’ manure. I like working small-scale, but the sheer volume produced might force my hand to take up the offer from neighbor George to use his manure spreader and my front loader to distribute a bulk amount all at once.
I continue to use the oldest, bottom level of partially composted material as clean fill in a variety of places around our property, but I’m guessing there might come a day when I run out of a need for that kind of use. Maybe by the time that happens I will have perfected a system that allows me to offer (sell?) bagged horse manure fertilizer to interested gardeners as a means of distribution.
The current challenge has been moving the pile around to provide access to that base level of compacted material I want to use. Yesterday, when I was doing so, it became obvious how quickly the composting dries out an inside layer. The pile always seems so wet to me that I haven’t been worrying about adding moisture, but the light bulb came on when I saw the dramatic difference as a result of trying to move the entire upper level to a new location. I got the hose out and watered the pile, and Delilah. She absolutely cannot resist chasing water from a hose.
Unfortunately, that meant she was trying to chase it through manure. Not a pretty picture.
Relative Something 