Please compost your sawdust for at least a year before you add it to your garden beds. It is very hard to break down and robs the soil of all nitrogen in the process. If you mix it well with the chicken manure, keep it moist and turn it every couple of days or once a week it should be well enough composted in about a year to use on the garden. You can make a pile of all of this stuff and keep it together adding other stuff like kitchen waste, grass and leaves as they become available. If you have a problem with critters getting into it, you can cover it with a tarp, but usually they don't do any damage. Also, and don't be grossed out, human urine isn't bad for the compost and is another source of nitrogen or "greens." Plus it has the added bonus of repelling some critters that will mess up the pile or dig in it. Cheryl

Thank you all who have responded to my plea for help here. ___________________________ ----------------------] ] ----------------------] ___________________________ The center area of this rectangle is where the 1-2 year old horse manure/wood chips was spread an inch or so thing then tilled in. Only in this area did my garlic plants do poorly and/or die. The rest of it got manure from a different place. The other source if from a trainer that uses straw pellets as bedding and has a special tool to only pick up the biscuits. I put that stuff down at the same rate. the outside areas a perfect. The ground is a silty light soil, no I didn't do a soil test as I hardly ever do since I plant cover crops to add the N I need. There was something in that stuff that had a very adverse effect on the plants...maybe a certain broadleaf herbicide (curtail) was used on whatever he was feeding, maybe it's the wood chips that changed the soil ph so drastically ??? I might not ever know unless I spend some money to test that soil. From what I've read about horse manure, it has approx 3 lbs N per ton and some of that is lost in transport and whenever it is left out uncovered. So I'm not concerned at all about using that. Kimmsr, you and I have gone round and round about this for a couple years now.. I always appreciate your point of view. I believe I will take Alphonse's advice and obtain a couple loads of said hen droppings and sit on it for a few more months until I plant the next round of peas/vetch/clover this September and let it over winter in the ground. Should be just wonderful be next October '10.

I think the writer is full of that poop herself. She is perpetuating a common myth without getting out there and gaining her own personal observations from doing her own research. I have been using horse manure for years without the problems that is claimed in the article, I could post many, many pictures of excellent produce from my garden and my worm population has been excellent up until the last drought this past summer which took it's toll on them. However, they are bouncing back now. This following statement is crap too: "Another common problem with horse manure use is that, over time, crops often start showing signs of stunting or slowed growth. Soil tests can explain why. Adding horse manure to garden soil over many years can result in the buildup of toxic levels of magnesium. Because horses have an incomplete digestion system, sometimes large nutrient residues end up in the soil. Non-water-soluble residues such as minerals can be especially troublesome, in part because symptoms of nutrient excess can mimic symptoms of nutrient deficiency. " I just got the results back from two soil tests by a reputable lab and posted the results in another thread on here for all to see. One of them shows the magnesium level as just a bit low and the other one shows it to be medium. Many who have seen some of the many pictures that I have posted would probably agree that I do not have any problems with stunted plants or produce. She probably got her paycheck for the week so all is well, but she should be regarded as a fiction writer. If she is supposed to have credentials as some sort of an expert or knowledgable person, they would be suspect to me. That is my personal opinions, experiences and observations. Bill P.

My point is just that "knowing everything in detail because you've had a soil test" and "not knowing why things grow well in one place and not another" aren't the only available options. Many nutrient deficiencies or excesses have telltale signs in the plants that grow in their soil. I was taught to garden by my grandmother, who could always tell when plants needed more bone meal, but who wouldn't have known "phosphorus" if it bit her. She also knew if the garden needed lime based on what weeds started to take hold. In some ways I know a lot more about gardening than my grandmother did, and in other ways a lot less. I'm a geek at heart, and I enjoy understanding my garden and my soil like a chemist would...but at the same time, I really admire and aspire to the ability to tell a garden's needs in more of a "layman's" fashion. Achieving that level of understanding is the sort of thing that would really make me feel like an expert gardener. I've seen some excellent guides to the signs of nutrient deficiencies in plants, though some of them are published by people who are selling soil tests and/or customized fertilizers. I'm sure a Google search would turn some up.