well rotted manure and hygiene concerns

[ashleighParticipant]

hi all, i’m in a bit of a pickle

we have a new additional site this year. renting from a farmer who is happy to deliver tractor loads from his infinite sheep midden right to where we need it. the farmer is a talented veg gardener himself. he is interested and supportive to see us laying the manure in beds instead of digging.

HOWEVER yesterday he started telling me how of course we couldn’t possibly grow strawberries in those beds as to sell food that’s not for cooking that has been touching manure would be madness. i froze and sort of nodded as i’m not going to be growing strawberries anyway so i could let him have that point. but we are going to be growing salads! but it seems he’s assumed that our beds made our of muck are for other veg that grows higher off the ground. (he does know that our main business is salads though, and i didn’t dare remind him of that just now)

he suggested that for strawberries i should clear a patch in the grass and plant them there, which seems ludicrous – wild animals are using the whole field as a toilet all the time, what on earth is the difference??

help! am i missing something? the manure he’s bringing us i’d say is two years old or so, and as he brings more it will be older, from deeper in the pile. i am under the impression that it is fine to grow edibles on this, we did so in 2013 (on our first site) and ate and sold the veg, it was brilliant. now, the beds we made 18 months ago just look like lovely rich soil but when we first grew in them, last summer, they still did look like sheep bedding.

do you differentiate between which veg you grow in beds that are more manure-y vs. veg you grow in material that now looks like soil?

i guess what i’m asking for is confirmation that i haven’t misunderstood the whole no-dig thing, and that i can try and persuade him that it is becoming a NORMAL commercial salad growing practice to grow in well-rotted manure!

[charlesModerator]

 Yes this question may occur to others because of the word manure, which in the English language can mean anything from fresh dung to dar, well decomposed and crumbly material like compost. I often call it compost when well rotted, and compost is another word with multiple meanings.

Hence possible confusions!

i like manure to be at least a year old, dark in colour and little bedding visible for planting salad into, and for sowing carrots too. It is compost by then. Where and if I have spread less rotted manure, say only a year old with straw still partly distinguishable, I prefer to plant beans, squash, brassicas , alliums etc but in practice there is sometimes an overlap.

I find it strange that we agonise over bacterial counts,  while so many food crops are sprayed with glyphosphate.

[ashleighParticipant]

yes i expect we will be calling it ‘compost’ in our publicity!

i agree that it’s mad for people to be worried about ‘dirt’ on organic veg as opposed to the poisons on conventional veg. i wasn’t expecting to hear this from a born-and-bred farmer who is also now organically-minded in later life and has his own organic veg patch.

an expensive option would be to cover the salad beds in an inch of moorland gold compost so it looks ‘normal’, but i don’t really want to do that!!

[bluebellParticipant]

http://www.food.gov.uk/multimedia/pdfs/manguidfinaldraft.pdf

Wont go far wrong if you follow this. Don’t forget there are some farmers who spray fresh slurry etc which is why above is necessary! Not so sure about what they say regarding windfall fruit….

[ashleighParticipant]

it’s good to know the official guidance, thank you for that!

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