If the compost is still hot it is not yet ready to use. You could buy some and then let it finish composting, or wait until it is finished before buying any.

I just had the guy deliver 5 cubic yards as I thought 10 cubic yards would take up too much room in my driveway. He only charged me $55 delivered, which is about one third to one fourth of what the commercial topsoil and mulch companies want for compost delivered. I don't think it has been composted very long as I can still see many road apples in it. It consists of horse manure, sawdust/wood chips, and what he says is alfalfa hay. It doesn't smell too bad and once I get this stuff wheeled uphill in a wheelbarrow to my backyard I think I'll buy another half truck load. I started spreading it six inches thick around the bases of my fruit trees.

Horse manure does in fact have less salt in it than steer manure. The reason it is cheap is that many horse owners have to PAY to get rid of the manure. If they can sell it mixed with wood chips (which are usually free from any municipality) as future compost, that is better for them than paying for it to be hauled away. But since it is useful for you (and it would probably take a long time and a lot of effort to cart that much horse manure home on your own) it seems like a decent purchase price.

You might want to check out free horse manure opportunities in your area as well, if you have anything to haul it in. I use horse manure in my compost and gardens, The stuff that isn't composted or put into a lasagna bed I keep in large containers to age. The stuff I am using now is from last fall. I mix it in with soil for pots and all kinds of things, I got some excellent peppers growing in pots last year with aged horse manure worked into the dirt.

Marcia

I did some internet research on horse manure and one article says a 1000 pound horse will produce about 50 pounds of manure a day, and add in the bedding and a stable owner will have to dispose over over 9 tons of waste per horse per year, so as the previous poster stated they will often give it away. However the article says they can add value to the waste by properly composting it to the point where they can often sell it.
That said, it appears the stuff I bought is only slightly composted, probably because it is so dry (we only had two and a half inches of rain total in my part of Southern California in the past 14 months). So I guess I can either spread it and let it slowly compost in place (I think they call that sheet composting), or make a pile and try to speed up the process by wetting it down and adding nitrogen in the form of urea. If I use it raw around my fruit trees is there any danger if the layer is only about six inches thick? Is it OK to let it touch the tree trunks? I want it as close as possible for weed and grass suppression. Also, the hay which the guy said was alfalfa has big seeds on it that look like huge grass seeds. If I use it raw will I later be plagued by some kind of coarse pasture grass?

I bought hot horse manure last year and I have the nastiest bunch of weeds you ever saw! I am certainly regretting it now.

californian- If it is finnished, then six inches would be ok but keep it away from the trunks.

tj

Horse manure /wood shavings (or sawdust) compost will still contain large amounts of wood (C) upon cooling.The N is coming largely from urine which evaporates/off gasses,and not from the muffins.
As a mulch it's probably OK but any soil incorporation will likely tie up N.

Bill, nice compost. In one of the photos, I saw a tiller.. do you till the compost before you use it? I'm assuming you screen it as well?

Bill,
I use a lot of horse too.It's impossible to say what balance of wood any particular stable uses.I get from five different stables,some are breeders,some are boarders,and there is one just-keeps-horses-for-fun person.
Pellets are the big thing if you're using wood,apparently.The individual size of the wood is no larger than 1/32".Still,it never breaks down in one cycle.As I recall,wood has a C/N of 400:1,and the muffins are only a fraction of the N that went into the horse as Alfalfa.
So there's no way I could predict what or how any compost or straight broadcast made with wood will react with usage.Just that there is no comparison to getting bedding of only manure,straw(& hay)+ urine.Why I thought a caution worthwhile.
Actually,50# a day is probably right,if you're getting fresh.
None of the farmers here will take the wood based bedding,and most gardeners are wary of it.Makes you wonder why.

Lynnem, I run my tiller in my compost pile a few times while it is composting. First time is after it has gone through the first heat cycle and cooled off, which weakens the structure of leaves etc. That way it breaks up well and nothing winds around the tines. I pile it back up and put any thing that was on the outer edges into the middle and add more material if I have any more that I want to add. That also affords me the opportunity to see that it is uniformly moist through out. It will usually heat back up again a time or two. By the time I am done with it, there is no need to screen it. Here is a picture of some of that pile {{gwi:56494}}, there is nothing there that needs to be screened.

My sis in law raises some high dollar quarter horses and buys those thin wood shavings in big clear plastic bags. I know what she uses in her stalls. She feeds them the best feeds and alfalfa hay. As horses eat, they get a mouth full of hay and frequently scatter a bit of hay around the stall as they turn their head while chewing. This is a bit more close up of that {{gwi:271665}} which does not seem to have any wood products visible in it.

I had another good source near by till last year when Cowboy, one of my neighbors sold his place and moved further out into the country. He was still roping at age 76, had an arena and calves to rope. He used sand in his stalls, cleaned them out with his tractor and piled everything up way out back. There was some fine amendments in that pile. Due to the nature and make up of a horse's foot and hoof, you want something relatively soft, or at least flat without stuff like rough wood chips sticking up in their stalls, but perhaps it is a mater of semantics on what we are calling "wood chips".

I will defer to your better guess of a horse passing 50 pounds of manure per day, although I was raised around them, have rode them and worked them off and on through my life, I never tried to keep an accurate weight or measurement of that, it just seems like a lot to me.
Bill P.

I just had the guy deliver a second load, $55 including delivery for about six cubic yards. The stuff is hardly composted at all. I found out he gets it straight from a bin at some horse stables in Colton. But it still looks like a good source of raw materials, consisting of I would guess about 65 percent sawdust, 30 percent horse manure, and about 4 percent straw, and 1 percent garbage like plastic, cans, dirt, leaves, branches, and even a piece of aloe vera and a candy bar. I spread all of the previous six cubic yards (the guy is generous and actually delivers about six cubic yards while I am only paying for five) around the bases of my fruit trees and ornamental plants. This load I will probably mostly pile up and let it compost fully. I will probably wet it down with a solution of urea mixed with water to speed up the process.

Bill, I haven't weighed my horses' output but I can tell you that a Momma and Baby draft horse put out a LOT of "stuff"; we have a dump cart that's 8" tall, 3 feet wide and 5 feet long and it gets filled twice in 3 days -- and that's from the pasture not a stall so there's no bedding taking up any of that room. And those cart-loads are HEAVY! We only got Momma last fall so we didn't have a whole lot of "stuff" to add to the garden this year, but next year when it has had time to compost we should really be able to grow just about anything. If anyone wants to come by and get a truckload, just let me know!

I know it has to do with tilling/breaking things up- and I know that my soil looks great, but Bill makes the best damn looking compost, I swear.

I have to agree that Bill's compost is the best looking I've ever seen. I just sit and look at the pictures and drool. I have managed to get leaf mulch that fine, but never from just compost alone. Its got to be the tilling of it, :)
Alberta

Aw shucks, thanks folks! ":^), Yeah I think that tilling it two or three times before the final time definitely is a big factor in making good compost like that, because it does help break it down but it also mixes it thoroughly and aerates it too. I went thru an evolutionary process to arrive at using my tiller. I tried turning with a fork, poking holes with a big crow bar, burying a perforated pipe in the pile and then used my {{gwi:283950}} and drilling numerous holes in the pile. Each of those approaches will make compost, given time, were progressively better, but took varying amounts of physical exertion, and my supply of that was limited.

I decided to use what ever mechanical means I had available to do the job in an agressive manner and it paid off well. I do not use much fossil fuel at all, it only takes a few minutes to till the pile up, and even less to pile it back up with my little {{gwi:283951}} on my garden tractor.

I also had a little brainstorm and made a {{gwi:283952}} to work on the lift on the garden tractor to fluff the pile with in between tillings. It also doubles as a fork lift on a limited scale. (I just enjoy playing around with my cutting tools and welder and making useful, functional stuff like that, not to mention saving labor and enabling me to do stuff that I could not otherwise do,

The other factors are lots and lots of shredded oak leaves and I have been very fortunate to obtain those pick up loads of about every imaginable kind of fruits and veggies from the supermarket dumpster too. Now they have locked them off. The manager said to call him a couple of hours in advance when composting time comes around again and he will save back some garbage cans of the good stuff for me. I hope that he is still there when I am ready again, if not I will be back to using horse manure (which is hard to beat) along with what ever else I can scrounge up.

Right now I am just burying my kitchen scraps and a little bit of garden waste, but that is breaking down and working.
Happy composting and gardening to you all.
Bill P.

Um, Bill, That dog you are burying in your compost pile might just still be alive.

Definitely not a vet but it looks pretty healthy in the picture. lol

Lloyd

Thanks P.T. ":^) That is Lady, my yard, garden and compost inspector. She is pretty agile and fast and has avoided disaster fairly often. She has to be everywhere I am and under foot or within arms length. Don't get me started, I could go on and on about her. I have been friends with lots of dogs in my lifetime, but she is by far the smartest one that I have ever seen. She can *tell time and gets a few phone calls of her own.

She has got pretty good sense however, we have hordes of mosquitoes with all the rain we have had. She has always been very alert to an opportunity to patrol the outside with me, but now she indicates that she is getting tired of getting stuck for the drinks and don't always want to go feed the mosquitoes with me.
Bill P.

Hi guys stumbled onto a friend that can provide me with a unlimited amount of manure mixed with wood chips that they use for the flooring all good stuff, I want to make good compost out of it and sell it off as this is a pricy thing in my town. I have a large area where I can place it for tilling and to dry however do I need to add anything else to it. Do not have a supply of leaves that I know is not mixed with weeds. And alternative to your tractor Bill what can I use to till it with and to break up the muffins

Please advice as it seems you guys are ardent pro's
Janneke

I sure miss ole Bill and his posts....think about him often whilst out working the 'post. He was definitely one of the good guys, RIP.

janneke, the last post in this thread was from 8 years ago. Glad you bumped it though as it was a nice read. To the OP if you are still around, I think that was a great deal at around $10.00 a yd delivered. I hauled a lot last month and will be hauling more over the summer building up for next year and also starting some large worm beds. It ended up costing me close to $5.00 a yd between fuel and maintenance for the truck I used plus my time going to get it and unloading it by hand (they loaded).

The place I am getting manure from is a wild horse rescue and they only feed top notch alfalfa and do not use bedding so its pretty much pure and I am hoping weeds will be a minimal nuisance. If your soil is short on OM (organic matter) then HM (horse manure) can be a great addition.

Janneke, you might not need any other ingredients if the C:N ratio is about right in the stuff you get. You'll be able to tell from the odor and whether it finishes all the way to compost or if you have wood bits left after it cools and cures.

I don't know where you are located, but if you are selling the product, you are a commercial operation and may need permits to have a commercial composting operation. You might want to check on that.

thanks soooo much for the reply yes will definitely look into the permit but i want to try and have it at the showgrounds where the source of the stuff is and there is no odor it is top notch that they feed these horses teff and hay some barley and grass. i am in Oudtshoorn South Africa very warm dry climate.

Exciting to have someone from South Africa here! Welcome. I was speaking of the USA in terms of permits, so I have no idea what the requirements might be for you.

Hey guys yes I am from sunny SA and we have plenty of the manure here lots, the machine i saw in the other photo seems as if it can break the muffins it also seems to run on a lawnmower engine ? please advice accordingly. Thank you for all the information and it helps a lot thank you