Southland
Robert Guyton might have found the right pet for his situation.
It’s not the meat, pelts or eggs I want from any of these lovely creatures though. It’s their dung and the reason I’m after that is because of my tunnelhouse.
As I learn more and more about raising vegetables under the cover of plastic,
I’m recognising the need to feed those hungry plants with something other than the compost that naturally sustains the plants in the outdoor forest garden.
What works out there – the active soil building processes of leaf fall, rainfall and the rain of guano from the birds that live in the trees – doesn’t apply inside the tunnelhouse. And still, I have to provide what works in order to keep my plants growing vigorously and nutritiously.
I know some gardeners use storebought, processed fertilisers and achieve impressive results from that, but I’ve taken a different path as a “natural” gardener and one who doesn’t like to spend money wherever I can avoid it.
Yet other successful vege gardeners too, like to leave the superphosphate on the shelves and instead, buy a bag of blood and bone, and plants thrive when fed that mix. However, I’m not a great fan of abattoirs and find myself conflicted when considering using that gruesome mix. So I’m left, in the main, with animal manures as the best option.
Sure, I do make seaweed and comfrey teas, but they just aren’t, it seems to me, as substantial a feed as those other options.
So while I do have a big barrel bubbling away beside my tunnelhouse and fill my watering can regularly from it, I can see the undercover veges need something “meatier”, so I’m looking at manure.
At first, horse manure seemed the way to go.
It’s freely available around here and pretty cheap to buy, but experience warns me that weeds sometimes come with the deal and some horse droppings, especially those of racehorses, can contain medicines that aren’t enjoyed by soil organisms. So I’m wary of equine manure.
Cow poo would be ideal, ideologically. I’m interested in biodynamics and the exalted position practitioners hold the cow in. I like the way a dried cow pat can be collected, transported and stacked; or at least, they could be, in the days when cow manure had substance and formed a pat – but modern cow manure is far too liquid to collect in the old way, so that’s off the list as well.
Pig poo pongs.
Pigeon poo is regarded as providing the richest manure of all, but I’d have to take up a whole new hobby if I was to keep them. Besides, my first attempt, many years ago, resulted in them all flying off, never to be seen again, at their very first release.
Chicken manure, well seasoned through heaping up or mixing with straw or sawdust, was a staple in my garden for many years.
It did the trick nicely; veges that were dusted with that mix grew extremely well and I had no problems with it.
Only, keeping the hens alive became a challenge when a wild cat began to be seen roaming the farmland nearby. One by one, the hens vanished – despite my efforts to build them an impenetrable wire netting sanctuary, and eventually, I ceased being a chicken-keeper at all.
I tried guinea pigs also, and found them fascinating and their poop plentiful and beneficial to plants. But while I really enjoyed their ways, they didn’t naturalise in my garden the way I had hoped and disappeared somehow, either carried off by a cat or up into the air by a hawk. Or perhaps they went wandering after discovering a gap in their cage… well, they haven’t been back.
I have a friend who breeds rabbits, so this is why I think they might be worth a try.
Perhaps I should go with a big breed that can fight off a feral cat and can’t squeeze through holes in the netting.
Rabbit pellets seem an easily managed product and won’t be filled with weed seeds, I’m guessing. The pellets will probably be okay for direct application and won’t need composting first, but I know what I won’t do with them, and that’s add them to the seaweed barrel, like I did last year with sheep pellets I bought from a garden centre.
The brew that resulted was beyond stinky and well into asphyxiating, and, when bucketed out and poured over the young trees in my native plants nursery on a hot, still summer’s day, resulted in an on-site, neighbourhood meeting-slash-protest that I’m still trying to live down!
A light sprinkling of rabbit poo won’t
– I hope and pray – have anything like the same effect.