[northfifeduckling]

is there  difference in usage for chicken (and duck) waste and well rotted horse manure? Do some veg do better with one or another? Can't find anything in my clever books 

[Fleecewife]

Well rotted horse manure, as long as the horses were bedded on straw, is the ideal manure - bulky and reasonably nutritious.  Chicken manure can burn plants unless it's very well rotted - this might be partly because the urea component is a solid rather than a liquid but I am just surmising here.  Also, not being great grass eaters, chicken manure is very concentrated - the bulk of horse manure is from all the hay etc they eat.
If shavings are used as bedding the result will take a long time to rot down sufficiently well that it will no longer remove nitrogen from the soil in order to break down further, so straw is far better as it will be well rotted down in a year.
We use sheep manure as we don't have horses and it is fairly similar. We rot it down separately from the chicken house cleanings so we can judge when each is ready but we use the two in a fairly similar way, rotavating it into the soil.  Compost made from plant residues only can be safely used as a mulch around plants.

[JD]

Hi Kerstin, according to my gardening 'guru' Geoff Hamilton chicken manure has a very high nitrogen content and should not be used neat but should be put onto the compost heap to assist in speeding up the composting process (especially for rotting down straw). He says the same for horse manure.
JD

[Moregin]

I can remember being told that the best in nutrients is  :pig:pig followed by  :chook:chicken,  :cow:cow then  :horse:horse.  I would counter that by saying that the way its treated and matured makes all the difference.  Well rotted anything is great but from my own experience horse does contain more seed matter as the pig/cow digestion breaks seeds down better where horses a can pass more through.  the farm next door allowed me to take all the manure i could handle so I spent a day mucking out old horse stables and spread it over the allotment on my first year as the ground had been unworked for some time - come summertime it was weeds galore!!!  I know the earth being disturbed would start lots off but the manure may have helped.

For a wee experiment in the Polytunnel I am using horse manure in hessian bags dropped into the water butts on rope as a 'teabag'.  At the moment the resulting brew is looking decidedly murky but I hope its giving me the goodness without the risk of seeds germanating.  The plan is to use it as a feed on half of my tomato's, cucumber, courgettes and stawberries and then compare it to the shop bought feeds used on the others.