Your onions should be fine, but you have to be careful with chicken manure for many reasons. It is good that you turned the soil, as this will help to break down the manure further and reduce the likelihood of pathogens. You are confusing two issues - one having to do with fertility (chicken manure is referred to as "Hot" because of its high Nitrogen content) - and the other to do with the transfer of pathogens, which relates to direct contact between manure and the edible portion of the crop. If you are spraying your cucumbers with fresh liquid manure, then you may have reason to be concerned, but if it is properly composted, and applied over 120 days before harvest, it should be safe to use. Root crops in highly manured soil tend to be lower in quality because the roots send out many feeder hairs, and the plant will have excessive vegetative growth. Drying chicken manure is less than ideal, because you will lose many of its nutritional advantages. In the interest of nutrition and general sanitation, it should be composted.

I know people (some are members of this forum) who routinely drive around the neighborhood and pick up bags of leaves set out on the curb for trash collection. I don't think there's any danger in doing that, in terms of the leaves being contaminated with anything worrisome. Some members of this forum just have agreements in place where the neighbors give them all their autumn leaves for the compost pile or for mulch and the gardener gives them produce in return in the summer months. There's more than one way to skin a cat. (Don't tell my cats I said that.) Even though we have 10+ acres of woodland, the only leaves we routinely collect are the ones that fall on the lawn. We just run over them with the mower and chop them up, catching them in the grass catcher and dumping them right from the grass catcher to the garden pathways. I could go into the woodland and rake up and collect a lot more, but I remain mindful of the fact that the leaves in the woodland will decompose and feed the woodland soil and then the woodland soil will feed the plants. For a few years, I did collect leaf mold and autumn leaves from the woodland, but always feel guilty when I take stuff out of the woods, so I try to only collect from the yard. Luckily we have planted tons of trees in the yard since moving here and they are big enough now that they drop lots and lots of leaves. Nancy, Once you get yourself in the mindset that it is better to be safe than sorry, then letting municipal compost age before you use it becomes second nature as does testing stuff before you add it to the garden. The price of being complacent and not testing is that you risk losing at least a year's worth of garden. Even if you find that compost or hay fails the bioassay test done with peas or beans, that doesn't necessarily mean you cannot use the compost or hay right away. You just have to use it with a crop that is not bothered by the herbicide residue---and that would be corn---any corn---sweet corn, field corn, flour corn, popcorn, etc. or sorghum or something similar. The persistent herbicides that are causing us so much trouble are the ones that are sprayed on hayfields/grassy type crops to kill broadleaved weeds. Those persistent herbicides won't kill your grassy type crops. Just something to keep in mind. Oh, and that's the exact reason that alfalfa hay remains safe to use---alfalfa is a legume, so the problem (problem from a gardener's point of view) herbicides cannot be sprayed on it or it would kill the alfalfa plants and there would be no alfalfa hay. I'd use alfalfa hay a lot except it is very expensive to buy. No one is responsible for the health and safety of our own gardens except for us. Just us. To steal from the title of my favorite TV show, this is us. No one cares about our gardens like we do. So, we have to shoulder that responsibility ourselves, because the rest of the chemical-using world is going to keep spraying their herbicides and they really don't care if it affects us. At least nowadays the persistent herbicides are labeled as persistent and the users are warned that plants sprayed with them can contaminate manure and compost. In the early days of the persistent herbicide crisis, the farmers using the herbicides was as shocked by their persistence in composted manure, compost, hay and even cattle feed as the gardeners were. Nowadays there is no excuse for a farmer or rancher passing on contaminated manure or hay and claiming they didn't know about the persistence of the herbicide. There's no way they don't know, unless they aren't reading the labels of products applied to their own property. I am grateful we live surrounded by ranches and not by farms. Anyone who lives close enough to a farm to have herbicide drift from that farm is going to have problems from time to time with herbicide drift a lot more often than those of us who generally only get hit in spring when everyone is either spraying their pastures with those persistent herbicides or spraying their fencelines with either glypohosate, 2-4-D or a combination product containing both. Well, unless someone lucks out and lives by an organic farm, but that would be an incredible stroke of luck. As hard as it can be to grow organically and in the safest and most sustainable way possible, it really is easier now that it ever has been before. There's a much wider range of organic products available, especially organic fertilizers, than what we had 20 or 30 or more years ago. There's more organic pesticides, though I still use them only minimally. There's barrier methods like micromesh or Biothrips proteknet, and summerweight floating row covers. We just have to stay on top of all the latest developments and perhaps work a bit harder to keep our gardens as happy and as healthy as possible. There were organic remedies I wouldn't touch with a 10-foot-pole decades ago (like rotenone and sabadilla) and there's still current organic remedies I prefer not to use, though they aren't as dangerous as the ones I mentioned. Remember that just because a product label says it is organic, that doesn't mean it is safe. It only means it is derived from a natural, not synthetic, active ingredient. Even more frustratingly, sometimes manufacturers add a non-safe extra ingredient to an organic product, and I won't use that product because of the added ingredient. Coming from a natural versus synthetic origin does not automatically make a product safe, and that is probably the single most misunderstood thing about organic gardening. For example, take diatomaceous earth--a longtime natural remedy. At one point, a specific manufacturer began adding a chemical pesticide to the bags of DE it produced. So, an unsuspecting person might think they were buying food-grade DE but they were buying a chemical pesticide "enhanced" DE. You always have to read the labels and know what you're getting! Organics are safer in general, but not all meet my own safety standards and not many of them end up in my garden. Remember that this is YOUR garden. You practically live in it in the summer, and (depending on your circumstances) so do your pets, your native garden helper wildlife like bees and toads, your children, grandchildren, spouses and some pets. It is your environment. Keep it safe. With my garden, except for obvious outside issues like herbicide drift that I cannot control, the buck stops with me. Nothing unsafe is going to make it into my garden unless I allow it to so do, and I don't. Because we all like to strive to grow in the healthiest way possible, we have to be the person who says no sometimes to products that can harm as much as they can help. I know plenty of people who use all sorts of synthetic chemicals in their gardens on a regular basis and that's their choice. My choice generally is not to use those in mine. You have to decide what matters to you. Some people use synthetic fertilizers and fungicides and are okay with that, but never would use a synthetic herbicide or pesticide. Some use nothing but organics. Some use nothing but synthetics. Some people who never, ever, ever would use a synthetic product of any sort in their garden still refuse to acknowledge the risk involved in bringing in outside manure, compost or hay and that's a sort of Russian roulette they're playing with their otherwise organic garden. They're playing the odds. Sometimes it is an accident---like a rancher who also is a gardener forgets they bought a lot of hay one summer in drought and they forget that the manure in the cattle barn might have herbicide residue in it from that purchased hay and they use that manure in their garden, thereby poisoning their own soil with a product that they don't even use on their own property. It happens. People are human and make mistakes. Some of us strive to be as organic as possible, but will use a synthetic pesticide, for example, in a worse-case-scenario where organic pesticides repeatedly have failed to halt the pest damage and we are stepping up to the next strongest pesticide, which happens to be synthetic. Never say never but instead focus on using integrated pest management wisely and in a way that fits with your own standards. You never know what a huge invasion by something like blister beetles or grasshoppers might push you into doing. Some day you may have to use a product one time that you normally never would use. Allow yourself to do that if it is the only way to save your garden. I think there's worse things in the world than spraying a synthetic pesticide one time, though I'd never routinely spray one. While it always is my choice to be as organic as possible, I did spray a broad-spectrum pesticide one time (yep, as in one time in my entire life) and the world didn't end. I hated doing it, but it saved my garden. I still hope I never have to do it again. In the end, we all do what we have to do to feed our gardening addiction. I just hope we all try to be the kind of gardeners who create a garden that is a beautiful, healthy and productive ecosystem, and never forget how many other little living creatures share the garden ecosystem with us. It's not only about the plants. While I don't want to do things that harm the plants, I also don't want to harm everyone else who lives in or passes through the garden---and that includes the birds, lizards, toads, frogs, turtles, skinks, butterflies, hummingbirds, green lacewings, beneficial wasps, earthworms, ground beetles, assassin bugs, etc. Dawn

Dear Trish! Ouch!!!! I can just see the whole event happening in front of my eyes! Yes, kids can get into the the most interesting situations at times. This little lady also broke her ankle on a swing at school about seven months ago, just a few days before her fourth birthday. So it was the whole process of rushing to hospital and dropping her three-month old baby sister and my eldest off at someone's house along the way while at the same time trying to comfort her and keep all calm. At that time my husband was gone for work so it was quite a challenge. After the whole stint in hospital, we had to carry her around for the whole time while she was recovering as she could not mobilize with crutches (too young ). In the end, she got so frustrated and she started to bum-shuffle, which was hilarious. :-) I found her one day trying to water my pots outside while still shuffling on her hands and buttocks, dragging the hose behind her :-) :-) :-) At least it is a bit easier this time around (that is, after surgery and the visits to the wound care nurse to clean the finger), and I know she is getting better the moment she starts watering the garden, which she has :-). She has a great affinity for soil and dirt and I must just try to keep her away in order to keep the finger clean until it has healed appropriately. Easier said than done :-) Moses and Lisa, I had a good laugh about your initial confusion about the word "kraal" My apologies! One tends to forget that local vernacular is not always known internationally. But well done on your investigations! Lisa, If I remember correctly you also have some Dutch heritage? I initially thought "kraal" might have had its origins in Dutch (where Afrikaans originated) but after reading your posts it struck me that the word might have come from the Koisan or other indigenous African languages - it indeed refers to an enclosure for cattle although, in centuries past, I think it was also used to refer to an area where groups of dwellings of particular tribes were constructed in a circular pattern which were then closed off with thorny branches etc. in order to keep wild animals out. We have so many languages over here and we all eventually "borrow" words from each other so "kraal" is an accepted English word here as it is in Afrikaans (our home language) and several other languages as well :-). One tends to forget that it is not necessarily known internationally. Moses, I think our mushroom compost might be similar to yours although I believe (I stand to be corrected) that we use coir peat instead of peat moss, which is not such a sustainable resource over here. We also have mushroom growers, possibly in greenhouses? They are readily available in our supermarkets although prices can be slightly more expensive at times. I used peat moss for my roses the previous time I amended some garden beds but was not satisfied with the soil quality a year later, that's why I considered the "kraal manure" Thanks to all of you I think I might get the recipe better this time. I really can't wait to get all my roses in the ground. The previous time was a bit easier as I had to start from scratch so I could design everything as I wanted. This time we have moved into a much bigger but older house with a large established garden (although not a single rose apart from 5 iceberg tree roses (we call them standard roses) at the gate. There are many trees providing lots of shade and it is a bit more daunting to think what must be moved / removed/ altered as there is already a basic plan and I don't want to simply redo the whole place right now. :-)

I agree with toxcrusadr that it is most likely some fungus, mold or actinomycetes. I have definitely had the characteristic white-ish looking stuff from actinomycetes on somewhat drier fibrous material like cardboard (which I'd say looks more like mycelia but can be a bit powdery). After a while, the cardboard would crumble easily in the hand, i.e. it was being decomposed thoroughly, and have a very distinctive earthy smell, more acute when damp. (I believe I read that actinomycetes are one of the sources of the chemical geosmin, which literally is 'earth smell.') Some of the white stuff would look powdery especially after turning or disturbing the pile. (Note one shouldn't breathe dust etc from compost into lungs, esp if shaky immune system/immune compromised, but smelling carefully probably okay). Anyway, whatever it is, almost certainly just a normal part of decomposition. Some fungi and other decomposers prefer damp/wet, some prefer dry, some hot, some cool, etc., so pretty normal to see some variation - conditions in the pile will also vary from layer to layer and further in/on surface. All those denizens of the pile also have their own reproduction methods and ways to spread/move through the pile to the food and conditions they want, and that can make things look different.