Sounds like your manure pile is 'old' and therefore completely composted. Not sure about the others. Fresh chicken poo for example, can burn plants with too much N. All these ingredients would be good after composting, just make sure you get both greens and browns in the pile. Assuming the manure/soil pile is the only one that's well aged, I would spread that where you want to garden and till it in. Start small or buy some extra compost if you don't have at least an inch or two on the ground. This fall, you'll have compost made during the summer, so layer on or dig that in. Things will improve each year.

Creating your own mix is a lot of fun. I usually collect most of my seed, but still end up purchasing a few odds and ends that I can't grow or collect enough of. There is a wild variety of Lupine! I encourage you to buy and plant many. They do require a well-drained soil that is typically sandy in nature, but as long as it is well-drained you should be just fine. They spread prolifically by ejecting their seeds from the pods. In the future you will be able to collect the dark pods before they pop if you want to choose where you'd like them to go. Mixes do contain a lot of filler plants, so designing your own may be best. Make sure to include some type of grass though. Without grasses your project will turn into a weedy mess in years to come and you will just want to start over. I'd recommend little bluestem since it is pretty tidy and isn't too aggressive. Plus it's short so you'll be able to see your flowers. As for flower recommendations, you can purchase purple coneflower, black-eyed susan, and annual phlox for very little money. Yellow coneflower is also very inexpensive and simple to grow and maintain. I would highly recommend planting some Butterfly Milkweed seed though. "Butterflyweed" is a must in a wildflower garden and I'm sure that if you do a simple Google image search you'll agree. I recently planted another new prairie myself and you may find some inspiration in my project. Here is a link that might be useful: Improved Ecosystems

DWD2, thank you for posting your methodology. It always good to see how others grow their seeds and compare methods. I have grown my own starts (36+ tomato varieties) for the past 5 years. Before last year, I had not had too many plant health problems, except for the first year when my light system was not close enough to my plants. In that year I had problems with leggyness. I strongly suspect that my problem last year was the seed starter mix, but it could have been a few other things. I may have introduced disease into the first batch by incorporating compost into the mix. I think this is unlikely because in other batches and other treys I did not use compost in the mix but still had the same problems. Also, once the plants were in the ground they recovered and grew well the rest of the summer. If it were a disease I would have expected that the plants would still have had problems after planting, which they did not. Tomatoes are really amazing in what they can take early on and still produce well. For example, I had a mouse eat all the leaves of two plants shortley after they were in the ground. There were only stems left and I thought they were done, but I did not pull them out. Both plants sprouted new leaves again and became bushy healthy plants. I was astounded. I have had others suggest that with an approximately 50/50 mix of vermiculite and peat, I may have had water retention problems that suffocated the roots. Thats possible, but I was pretty careful about my watering. I can't totally rule that out. It may also have been too many nutrients from a dilute solution of fertilizer at watering as the problems occured shortly after that. I have read that new seedlings don't need many nutrients becuase they get what they need from the seeds/cotyledons. Some have even suggested that you will cause more problems by fertilizing than just not fertilizing. The reason why I fertilized is because we had a number of storms in May that pushed my planting date back 3-4 weeks longer than our average frost date. So I fertilized a little. I may also have had root binding problems. There is another possiblity which DWD2 suggested. I used a seed heating matt for the first time last year and most of the tomatoes had it under them for at least a day. So I may have over-heated the soil a little and damaged the roots. However on the last seed trey that got started late, I did not use the heat matt because I suspected it may have caused the problems. Yet I still had the same problems in the last trey. My strongest suspicion is still the starter mix. I have read the ingredient list on several seed starting mixes. In most cases, they usually contain peat (as the main medium plus it has high cation exchange capacity) + vermiculite (for micro nutrient exchange and water retention) + lime (to balance the PH of the peat). They sometimes include perilite, but sometimes not (example Jiffy), they also sometimes include a few other things (mycorrhizae for example or a source of nutrients). The main ingredient that I was missing that most starter mixes have is lime for ph balance. I could not find lime in any stores in Utah at the time. They do sell it here, but it is not a common soil amendment in Utah because most Utah soils are slightly alkaline (PH 7.8-8.2). So most folks would not want to add lime. This year I am interested to try mixing my own starter again but I wanted actual recipies to get an idea of the right proportions to use. Also I had no idea that mycorrhizae was available so I am defintley going to use that in my mix. Alternatively I could just buy a pre-made starter mix, but I wanted to save money and its a learning experience as well.

I like that! Thanks for sharing. I need a few more February projects until I can start my peppers and tomatoes indoors in March. Is spring getting longer? lol