Horse manure for fertilization of my fruit trees.

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Lee
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Horse manure for fertilization of my fruit trees.

Post by Lee » June 8th, 2017, 12:45 pm

I just purchased a house and there is a stockpile of horse manure that has been sitting for 3 plus years. Would my fruit trees benefit if I spread the horse manure at the base of the tree. I have 1 foot high berms around the trees that are 15 feet in diameter. I didn't know what to do with the stockpile and thought that might be a good use. The trees have never been fertilized as far as I know. At the very least they haven't been fertilized in the last 2 and a half years. Thank you.

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MorpheusPA
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Re: Horse manure for fertilization of my fruit trees.

Post by MorpheusPA » June 8th, 2017, 1:12 pm

Three years? It smells like fresh earth, with no notes of stink or rot or that odor I just call "get that away from me"? Bits and pieces aren't recognizable, but instead it's all a dark brown to black mass of crumbly goodness?

If so, it's OK to use. It won't do much in terms of fertilization--it's well-aged compost by this time--but it's a great source of organic material.

Lee
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Re: Horse manure for fertilization of my fruit trees.

Post by Lee » June 9th, 2017, 6:55 pm

Thank you for your time MorpheusPA. It just has a light smell of manure. Many of the chunks had not broken up yet. I live in a dry climate so that might be why it hasn't completely decomposed. The whole pile is very dry. We had a late freeze this year which killed almost all of the buds on all of the trees except one. The one is loaded with apples. The other apple tree has nothing. 4 buds survived on our peach tree. I think I will fertilize all the trees with it but put a little more on the apple tree that is producing.

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