Oh my gosh, I use it everywhere!
I'm lucky in that my neighbor, who has a horse, brings it over himself and dumps it into a huge pile in the back of my lot.
It tend to sit there for a while before I get to it, so it's aged. I wouldn't call it composted.
I've put it in the veggie garden every year for 20 years. The soil is sooooo soft and easy to till now!
When I create a new terrace, I fill it with horse poop and let it rot for a few months to a year. Then I plant in it. I've been filling a large 40 foot diameter hole in the ground with it, leeting it rot, and planting daylilies in it. My rose garden was about 50% horse manure when I built it.
I put a ring of it around my little trees in the spring and let the rain water it in.
It does absolute wonders for the texture of the soil.
Stuff really GROWS in this!!
But so do the weeds.

Hi Charlene,

This is one time I might recommend a "proper" compost pile! That would kill the weed seeds! But, yeah, however you decide to use it, itÂs going to be wonderful stuff! Just donÂt put it on or around your plants when itÂs totally fresh or you could "burn" things.

I found this really, really good site about composting horse manureÂpronounced man-your-ay! :-) If you decide to actually compost it, this tells you exactly what to do, and even how to aerate it without turning it. But remember, this site is from Wisconsin where itÂs wet and humid, so youÂre far more likely to need to add water out here rather than needing to protect it from rain. Just click on Composting Methods on the bottom for the how-toÂs.

Have fun playing in theÂahÂman-your-ay,
Skybird

Here is a link that might be useful: Composting horse manure

Actually, Skybird, the link is to Whatcom County. The WSU is Washington State University. Whatcom County doesn't ring a bell . . . think, Bellingham. Yep, just south of Vancouver, BC.

Wet, cool or wet and cold, so your shoes and all your clothing will grow mildew if you leave them too long in the closet. Whatcom County, home of Holland Days!! (Lynden Washington elevation 58 feet.)

The idea of not putting your compost where it will sit in a pool of water makes some sense. High tide may carry it away. Here, I like to dig down about 8 inches in our rapidly draining glacial till and start the pile, below grade. I bet a hose could be run full-on for 24 hours without filling a 7'x7'x8" "pool."

One result of digging down is to provide me with SOIL Â a component I think of as essential for building a compost pile. Most of it will go on top after I've finished my layering.

And, layering is important, too. This "recipe" doesn't say much about other ingredients. Horse manure and bedding won't decompose as well if used alone.

The bedding is an important issue which the writer considers. I'm afraid that lots of folks who keep horses are too sanitary. I used to go to this conscientious horse trainer who brought in wood shavings by the dumptruck load and kept his stables spanking clean. Unfortunately, wood doesn't decompose very well and I finally gave up on him and begin getting manure elsewhere. If youÂre lucky (or not) Charlene, your neighbor wonÂt be so tidy.

You can overcome the wood by adding a good deal of weeds, grass clippings, and/or chicken manure. If anything can work its way thru wood itÂs chicken manure. Don't be afraid to add fertilizer. A good balanced fertilizer can't hurt a thing and certainly isn't wasted since you are applying it all to the soil anyway.

Some folks think that you should have at least 5 different components for your pile but I think we do a little better than that. We enjoy a good deal of fruit and vegetables, year-around and that means lots of peelings and such from the kitchen. All of it goes in the compost.

Turning compost? I'm not really up to that anymore. I just keep it moist, pull the weeds off it (to compost in pile #B), and allow it to decompose at least 18 months. And, Cnetter is right, "(Horse poop) does absolute wonders for the texture of the soil."

Steve

Whoops! Wrong state! Oh, well, WisconsinÂWashingtonÂtheyÂre both wet! I grew up in Illinois, so Wisconsin seemed logical! I wondered what Whatcom was all about!

What made me think it would be pretty easy for her to do, Steve, is when I found this:

"On its own, horse manure is about the ideal ratio. But if you add a lot of bedding to your compost pile, you can end up with too much carbon and not enough nitrogen."

So I figured if horse manure is already the right composition, there wouldnÂt be any need to be "layering" or messing with finding all the right "ingredients." Just build a poop pile and let it do itÂs own thing! So to speak! I donÂt know about Charlene, but IÂm just not into complicated compost piles! Too lazy! I just throw whatever I find on top, wet it down fairly often in summer, and when the bottom looks black and yummy I pull it out and use it.

And if cnetter is just letting it age a little bit, it doesnÂt sound like youÂd need to do anything too special. Just thought if you could get the temps up in the pile it would eliminate a lot of the weed seeds, which would be a definite problem with horse manure.

Let us know what you decide to do, Charlene.

Happy poop piling,
Skybird

Some say horse poop is "hot" manure and will burn your plants. I'd just like to invite those with that belief to look at any horse owner's lawn when one of their horses has happened to have left a gift on the lawn. The grass around that pile grows like crazy and is really green! I honestly thing where the problem sometimes comes in is when urine is concentrated in the manure. Concentrated salts in the urine can be a little rough on your plants.

There won't be many weed seeds in horse manure if the horse is fed quality hay. It also depends on what cutting of hay the horse is fed - first, second, or third. First cutting usually has the most weed seeds. Second is usually the least weedy.

Here we pile up the manure from our five horses and our small herd of cattle with a blade. Each spring I spread it on the garden and lawns. I try to use the old manure on the gardens but, hey, it all works just fine. Here in the west our soil tends to be alkaline, and manure ups the pH, so I find adding as much organic matter as I can, and some peat keeps things in balance.

I thought I'd add just how I've been using manure in the veggie garden these last four or five years:

After I lay down my drip system, I put newspaper down between the rows to keep the weeds down - only a few layers. But the newspaper would blow away in our wind, so I spread manure on top of it to hold it down. The newspaper stays in good enough shape to do its job throughout the summer. By the following spring, the newspaper has rotted, the drip system get lifted up, and the garden get tilled.
Works pretty good.

I've used horse manure from my neighbor in past years, but I got a LOT of weed seeds from it. The weeds were different from others I had; they looked a lot like oat grass. Perhaps it was from oats they ate? Anyway, I decided that cows must be better manure producers, since they have more stomachs to digest the weed seeds. I have an acquaintance who will give me lots of cow manure, and I'm thinking of picking up some this year.

But then again, I do have a slow compost pile way in back, and maybe I should just throw some horse manure in there. It's so easy to get it from my neighbor.

I don't want to make too much of the hazards because the benefits are just SUPER. Our gardens are usually "organic matter deprived." I never have enuf compost, never enuf manure, organic fertilizers are expensive . . . And, nothing is as INexpensive as manure - often free.

Like Linda_Utah, I can remember my dad dragging manure out of the corrals with the tractor blade and spreading it on the garden. I can also remember how beautifully green the spinach was one year right up until the time we hit it with the irrigation. Then all those plants went flat against the ground and died. Just a little too hot!

A few years ago, I read advice by a Montana extension agent that flatly recommended against the direct application of manure to a garden. Her concern was 2-fold: salt in the manure and e. coli contamination of the vegetable garden.

IÂm with Skybird, no complicated compost piles but I am willing to compost. And, IÂve always been around to make use of the stuff after 18 months. If I was just starting out aaaaannndd in good enuf shape, I would take one-half of my available horse poop, dig the garden beds down to one-shovel depth and put 3 to 6 inches in the trench. Then refill with soil and plant. If the veggies donÂt want to go down into the manure, theyÂve got about 8 inches of soil to grow in. Twelve months later, most of that good stuff is still down there and better than ever. I have done this with manure, rain-spoiled alfalfa hay, half-finished compost, etc. many times in the past. A few weed seeds will surface after the first year but itÂs never been much of a problem. And, altho a lot of work, it is just about the best way to bring garden soil into good productive shape quickly.

Steve

Thanks for all the "crappy" advice!!! Just kidding, bad joke, but I couldn't resist!

Seriously thank you for your posts. So I think I'll go over in the next few days and get some of the brown gold.

I think I'll start a pile on the outskirts of our property and let it age and then I liked what Steve said about digging a trench. So I think this will work in my lasagna gardens.

I've got four new 5'x5' raised lasagna beds started with the materials I could scrounge up. I layered wet newspaper, then dried pine needles, then a layer of kitchen scraps that were previously frozen in a pile this winter, then dried leaves, and I'll think I'll do a layer of the horse poo litter and then compost/top soil mixture on top of that and then it's ready for planting. What do you think? The weed seed issue is a concern.

I was concerned about the pine needles but upon doing some google searches on lasagna gardening, I found that many have used pine needles in their lasagna layers. I still have seven huge bags of them from my neighbor.

Thanks!
Charlene