Written By Teresa Howell |
A gardener in Nevada faces many challenges. Beautiful spring days coax fruit trees into bloom, just in time for a hard freeze to cancel the crop. In July and August, the sun sucks the juice out of the hardiest plants. Wind-borne sand strips paint off houses and leaves off plants. Drought and Mormon crickets get anything left.
But Nevada gardeners can count on one thing–the purity of the soil. It’s either pure sand or pure clay, unless you’re lucky enough to be in one of the low-lying basins where salt and alkali collect.
Oddly enough, the cure for either sand or clay is the same: organic matter. Clay soil will hold water and nutrients much better than sandy soil, but it often lacks drainage, and dry clay compacts into brick. Organic material helps aerate the soil and adds “tilth,” that springiness in good soil. Sandy soil drains a little too well, and soil nutrients tend to leach away with the water. Organic material helps hold water and nutrients near the roots of the plant.
There are several ways to add organic material to the soil. You can add composted kitchen and yard waste. You can grow a “green manure” crop of clover, buckwheat, or something else, and till it under. I’ve heard that if you spend a season repeatedly tilling in green manure, the next year you’ll have wonderful soil.
We didn’t have enough time to use either of the above methods on this year’s garden. That left us two options, peat moss or manure. Nevada is low on peat bogs, but we have lots of manure.
Early this spring, I took possession of several pick-up loads of goat manure. Manure is like wine; it improves with age, and this stuff was vintage; at least two years old. It was wonderful stuff, dark and crumbly.
We spread it on the beds shortly after we got it. Since the garden is new, we spaded on about four inches and worked it in well. Next year, we probably won’t need to use quite as much.
I need to interject a warning about handling manure in a garden: it’s a job that’s best done alone. Working with manure lends itself to all sorts of unsuitable jokes, which I can not repeat here. It’s very hard to shovel manure when you’re doubled over, laughing.
Wise gardeners know their manure, or at least where it comes from. Some manure, especially fresh manure, can be high in salts, particularly if the animals had extra salt in their diet. Organic gardeners may not want to put manure from animals which were given antibiotics or hormones.
The bedding material may affect the manure, especially fresh. Straw and sawdust eventually add nitrogen, but while they are decomposing, they will actually use it. However, any urine in the manure will provide a boost of immediately available nitrogen, although at the risk of burning crops.
Not all manure is alike. Bat guano is one of the best. In England, where gardening and literature both thrive, bat dropping or guano, imported from British colonies in the Pacific, was a big industry in the earliest days of the twentieth century. It was so important that a guano mine has a place in the British literary classic, Lord Jim.
Those of us not blessed with colonies in the Pacific need to find other options. Chicken manure has a very high nitrogen content, so it will burn crops if it’s added fresh, but aged, that same high nitrogen content is a boon.
Small round droppings, like those from rabbits or goats, make excellent fertilizer. They are high in nitrogen and don’t usually contain weed seeds. It should be aged, though.
Llama manure, my friend Becca attests, doesn’t need to be aged at all, and can go on the garden still steaming. Llamas also oblige by making their all their deposits in one place, so the stuff is easy to find.
Horse and steer manure are roughly equivalent in nutrients, but steer manure must be aged, while horse droppings can be added fresh, according to some sources. However, with their four stomachs, no weed seed can survive a trip through a cow. On the other hand, a horse’s digestive system treats those same seeds so well that they’re not only still viable, they’re surrounded by fertilizer to help them get a good start.
Proper composting will cook those weed seeds, so although you could put fresh road apples on your crops, you might not want to. In any case, the county extension publication, “Basic Composting,” available at www.winnegarden.org, recommends that all manure be composted well before it is used on food crops.
A bit of scouting should lead to several good supplies of manure–feed lots, fairgrounds, or neighbors with animals. I’d love to help you shovel it, but manure brings out my barnyard sense of humor. I’d hate to interfere with your work.
When Teresa Howell isn’t enjoying the comical side of gardening, she teaches English at Great Basin College in Winnemucca.
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