Hi flying fish, If I understand your intent is to have your bat colony for guano production to use as a self-reliant fertilizer. Here is a long view for your project. The nitrogen form you'll start out with is urea & you need to get that converted by bacteria to the nitrogen plants use. You are discussing container growing; so the internet advice of apply it, then wait is probably for in the ground utilization with it's bacteria. Read up on how the fresh water fish aquariums control their toxic ammonia (from excreted urea). The trick is a small separate chamber to filter the water (with it's ammonia load) over a biological culture. I propose you set one up & this will get you the end product N as useable nitrate (NO3) for container growing. There are DIY bio-filter designs you'll find (my link skill is bad) & of course products sold for this to hobbyists. What you'll need is innoculation with autotrophic bacteria to colonize the filter surface area.( You can buy this or again DIY.) Your bacteria is a long term project at first, because must breed it up to handle the volume guano you want to process. Expect to nurse it for a couple of months, but in time it will handle a batch of guano in mere days. Your set up will be to circulate diluted aerated guano/urea/ammonia through the bacteria colony living on your bio-filter substrate. For this I recommend you sterilize the guano first; you can boil it or treat it chemically with chlorine (evaporate off chlorine next day with air pump bubbler). Now you have to prepare it for the bacteria & you must tweak the pH to keep it in a range that the bacteria can work best in. There will be a pH spike at the beginning due to the ammonia concentration. Get some pH color indicator paper (pharmacy expensive or laboratory supplier cheaper) on hand. Mix the sterilized guano with water at a ratio of 1:10 by volume & set the pH initially at between 6 & 7 pH. Use battery acid (33% sulfuric acid) to make a stock solution of 5ml H2S04/1 liter water & drop by drop this will let you get the pH spike down to where you want it. Now you are ready to feed the guano water to the bacteria colony. The bacteria will work between 6.3 - 9.0 pH. Monitor the solution as it will next drift down in pH & you may need to buffer the pH up (you do not use sulfuric acid for that). Your batch size, operating temperature ( +/- 28* Celcius) & bacteria herd will be what determine when the NO3 is done. When shut down circulating system retest the pH & adjust it to (ideally) 6.5 pH. Then let the muck settle & you can decant/siphon off the fluid to use. You want a liquid with TDS (total dissolved solids) of between 800 - 1,300 ppm (part per million) to use as fertilizer. The easiest way to measure this is with a meter designed for reading EC (electrical conductivity). If resulting ppm range is either too low, or too high, add more guano solids or conversely more dilution water. (The hard way to measure ppm: filter the muck & let it dry, so then can measure it at ratio of 0.001 gram per 1 liter of water for each 1 ppm solution.) Your guano's NPK proportions you will eventually find usefull to know.

Too much N too quickly...a bit of "burn" going on. The plants will most likely make it through it. You might want to give them a deep watering to flush the soil out a bit out. You'll know a lot more about the extent of the damage over the next few days. Most plants will show initial fertilizer burn on the leaf tips/margins, but peppers and some other plants will burn like shown. This post was edited by nc-crn on Tue, May 28, 13 at 19:19

Actually, migrating birds are the common suspects when it comes to spreading Type A viruses. Bats are mammals, not birds. They hibernate or do a combination of a short migration combined with hibernation. What's new is finding this virus in bats, not because it hasn't been there before, but because they haven't looked there before. From the article: Despite this warning, scientists have not been able to grow the new bat virus in chicken eggs or human cells, which is possible with existing flu strains. This suggests that the immediate risk of infection to humans is small. Rather than highlighting a danger to human health, this study is likely to guide further research that may improve the understanding of potential pandemic flu threats to humans in the future. Here is a link that might be useful: Unique new flu virus found

When farming there are issues to consider when fertilizing during and after a drought--I honestly don't know if it would carry over to gardening or roses in particular. It might be something to think about. Fertilizers move through the soil with water. With row cropping what farmers have found is that in drought years their plants take up less of the available fertilizer in the soil because of the lack of water movement in the soil. When the drought abates and the farmer continues on with his fertilizing program he can end up over fertilizing because he doesn't adjust to the high amounts that are "left over" from the previous year(s) of drought. If farmers had a crystal ball and they KNEW in advance it would be a drought year they would reduce the amount of fertilizer before hand! I just wonder, considering your drought situation what/how much fertilizers are still in the ground from previous applications you've done that haven't been taken up yet (and would have been in wetter weather) and that are still in the ground. I also woudl wonder if putting a high nitrogen fertilizer without the benefit significant watering/rain is the best thing for plants that may already be stressed because of the drought. Again--I know that these are farming consideration, but I don't know how it applies to home gardens! It might be a good question for someone that has more experience in gardening in drought/dry areas.