Many garden centers sell inexpensive pH test kits. They're fun, and simplify all that pH stuff. Your manure and organic matter (and the life forms they support) will nudge it toward neutral over time, and it can be interesting to watch. Fall is the best time for serious liming. Permanent pathways provide habitat for earthworms, ground beetles, etc, and give you some access regardless of the weather. For temporary access to some areas, you also can lay boards on the ground and stand on the boards. If you planned to use your wheat as a cover crop, you'll need to take it down 2-3 weeks before you need the space, or you can pull it up and let it dry into mulch, or compost it. In mild winter climates, actively growing wheat does not go down without a little bit of a fight. Back to the permanent pathways. You can sow them with legumes and well-behaved grasses, and mow them to make mulch for the beds or rows next to them. It's a cool system. Picture it -- next year, a ribbon of crimson clover laced with blue bachelor buttons leads you to your beautiful [fill in blank] and you feel so happy! Here is a link that might be useful: my website

While I won't begrudge anyone who wants to be more careful about food safety and manure, I really don't think it should be a problem for @hu-randomnumber. Food safety guidelines are generally about using 'fresh' (not well composted) manure, and IIRC are generally minimum recommended in the range of 4 to 6 months before harvesting. Horse manure that's been outside for two years or more should be perfectly fine. (General 'wash carefully' guidelines apply anyway - even compost from kitchen scraps or just soil have bacteria). Also, if you look around, manure application guidelines are mostly about cow manure - because it's most often from large dairy operations (where the average size in USA is something like 4000 head). That's where the commercial scale manure is. Horse manure is (in my opinion) less of an issue - digestive systems are completely different - more 'roughage' and more air in horse manure, mixed with drier bedding, and much more likely to compost well. And horse operations are smaller and manure much less likely to be held in a slurry pond or wet pile with no air. At any rate, again, to each his own, but personally I'd have zero specific concerns about well-aged horse manure as described in a vegetable garden, for me or my children.

As I stated in my original post. I can give you some numbers if you're interested but I won't post actual documents. Sorry, it's a legal thing. By the way, you may be on to something regarding the diet but my gut feeling is that differences in diet will only go so far. Their physiology is very different from cows, horses, etc. (primarily how their body uses water, which I'm guessing affects solute concentrations in their tissues and waste). I could be wrong but I'd be willing to bet that it's going to be salty regardless. I'm also taking into account the fact that zoos will usually try to mimic the diet that their species typically has access to. Anyway, I have averaged out some results and here are a few of the highlights. The salinity level of the camel manure typically came in around 30 to 35 dS/m. For comparison, a soil salinity level of 3.0 dS/m is considered elevated and could cause some plants to start showing foliage burn and reduced vigor. (Another fun factoid I'll throw in here just for kicks ECw of sea water is around 40 dS/m or so.) Of course, you would be amending with the stuff rather than planting directly into it so let's explore that a little more. Let's say you were amending a sandy loam soil at a typical compost rate of 4 cu. yds. per 1000 sq. ft., tilled to a depth of 6 inches. (to get an organic content of approximately 20% by volume.) That would raise your salinity by about 10 dS/m, which would be on top of whatever the salinity level in the soil was before you started amending. 10 dS/m alone would be enough to cause most plants to show burning and stunting. Many plants would just plain die. Also consider the fact that about 70% of the salinity level is coming from soluble sodium. (around 250 milliequivalents per liter) Also, soluble chloride was found to be around 200 to 300 milliequivalents per liter. The high sodium and chloride values brings up the specific toxicity issues I described above. Also the abundant sodium is not balanced by calcium and magnesium and you end up with an SAR of around 35 or so. (An SAR of 6 is considered elevated) and use of such a high sodium / low calcium and magnesium material could bring about an elevated SAR in the soil, which can impede soil structure and water infiltration. I also noticed something else that I'd forgotten about. The boron values in the samples I'm looking at come in at about 5 to 6 parts per million (ppm) in saturation extract. If used at the 4 cu. yd. rate, this would be likely to bump the boron level above the threshold at which a broad range of plants start to show boron toxicity symptoms (burning of foliage and poor growth performance). The really fun part about boron is that it does not leach readily and, consequently, correcting an elevated boron level in the soil is particularly challenging. Could you use it at a very low rate and avoid the problems? Well sure, but like I said before, a rate low enough to avoid the problems would provide very little benefit compared to other materials. Of course, maybe all camel manures aren't equal but with the information I have, I would stick with something less exotic.

OMG cat litter!!!! Truly, this familiarity with the end results of digestive systems speaks of a deeper (more insane) love of roses than I am prepared to engage with. For a fastidious nation (regarding shower usage and toiletry sales in the US), you sure are happy to grub about in poo!! I have used manure in the past (and definitely never younger than 6 months on an open heap) but usually as a tea since the practice of putting anything around roses, including proprietry fertilisers has always been something of a conundrum because I do not have any visible space. I do not love the practice of heavy mulching since I do not wish to see soil, mulch, hay, bark, and definitely not poo in any form.......I want plants...and more plants....not spaces for fertiliser which can be either dug in at the first or watered on throughout a plant's life. But that's just me. On a less personal note, using manure of any type has become a complete no-no here in the UK unless you are absolutely sure of what pasturage has been used at every stage of a horses (or cows) life and can guarantee no broad leaf weed killers have been deployed. In the UK, we certainly cannot and since most horse-owners have to buy hay at least some of the year, only a fool would risk putting the resulting manure anywhere near their plants.....unless they are completely OK with manure contaminated with clopyralid/amypyralid or any of the later broad-leaf weed killers after 2.4.D. Of course, if you have access to your own horses and own grazing meadows which are unsprayed, then fair enough, but sadly, manure, in whatever form, has become a thing of the past for may gardeners in the UK since we neither trust nor believe farmers to read the tiny print on the labels stating not to be used when hay is going for silage.