Re: road apple/experiment

Well, first, it's gotta stop raining. Then, this will be a new stage of an old experiment.

At the farm, I built 4-foot by 8-foot by 2-foot high plywood boxes [frames, actually, no top or bottom] and filled them with bales of bright straw. As I recall, each box held eight 3-wire bales [still baled; didn't take the wires off]. I heaped used litter from the chicken house on top of the baled straw. The litter was also bright straw but quite loaded with chicken manure. Then, I planted tomato plants directly into the layer of used litter and rigged up a micro-sprinkler system to irrigate the boxes daily during the growing season. We're talking San Joaquin valley here, where temperatures can reach 107 in July/August; the sprinklers were as much to keep the plants from wilting as to water them.

Conventional wisdom says chicken manure is too "hot" to use right out of the chicken [it is both fecal matter and urine]; all I can say is tomatoes must like it "hot" because they produced really large crops in a very small space.

Horse manure is not as hot as chicken manure [any urine in it is incidental and probably accidental]. I think it's less risky to the plants. And pineapples love fertilizer--more so than tomatoes, I think. So we'll see how it copes with this growing opportunity. And, in the meantime, the horse manure will rot down into some nice compost. Thus, even if the experiment fails, it will not be a complete loss. And if the experiment works, I'll trade Colleen a nice plump pineapple for another 15-gallon pot of road apples--and try to grow something else in it.

On May 5, 2005, at 1:27 PM, TeichFlora@aol.com wrote:

HA, me too, David!!! LOL
I'm intrigued with the concept that you can plant a pineapple directly in
the bucket of fresh (?) "road apples" with just some soil on top??? I was
always under the impression that they had to be well composted before one could
use the "road apples" directly or it would cause burn, etc. As you know, Jim,
I'm a brom. person, so I'm curious....is this something you've done before
with success, or is this a new experiment??
Noreen
zone 9
Texas Gulf Coast

In a message dated 5/4/2005 11:02:27 PM Central Standard Time,
gardenchat-owner@hort.net writes:

Road apples? Thats a good one. I've never heard that expression before.
At first I had visions of a women in a wagon offering apples from her horse
drawn cart. Road apples!

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Island Jim
Southwest Florida
27.0 N, 82.4 W
Hardiness Zone 10
Heat Zone 10
Minimum 30 F [-1 C]
Maximum 100 F [38 C]

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