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| I was given a pickup full of horse manure and hay from my friend cleaning out horse stalls. I thought it was greens and I only had a bushel basket of leaves (browns) and 4 handfuls of saw dust so I wet it all down and ended up with a round pile 5 feet round and 6 feet high. This pile has to be at least 90% horse manure and stall shavings. In 4 days, the temperature is already 150 degrees in this pile.
My plan was to add the 20 bags of oak leaves I end up with every Fall but does this pile already have enough browns? I thought I needed at least 25 times more browns than than greens? I am so confused!!!! Thnx |
Follow-Up Postings:
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| Horse manure, alone, has an approximate C:N ration of 20:1 while that with bedding can be about 30:1 or right in that range the bacteria that digest the organic matter should be. Regardless of that I have mixed horse manure 1 part to 3 parts shredded leaves and have had very good results with that. |
Here is a link that might be useful: C:N ratio of horse manure
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- Posted by toxcrusadr (My Page) on Fri, Sep 28, 12 at 11:49
| You may have confused the C:N ratio with a brown:green ratio. You do want about 25:1 C:N in your pile, but that doesn't translate to the same brown:green ratio. The wood shavings are a super brown, something like 400:1. I suggest you observe and adjust. You can probably add some of those leaves since the temp is cooking along nicely. But it may be just fine without any. If it starts smelling bad, it needs more browns. If it gets much hotter than 150, it would probably benefit from some browns (some say that too high a temp reduces the quality of the product). So dig into it, check the moisture, odor and temp, and go from there. You have a great pile going! |
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