When Life Hands You Manure…Make Fertilizer, a Garden & a Barter Product

We’re living in a tough economy these days. As the household budget keeps getting tighter at our house we’re faced with more and more little dilemmas to solve.

We keep horses, two of them, and they are strictly for pleasure. We only go on an occasional trail ride, even less so now that working more has taken precedence over play-time. Having lost my job back in October and having my efforts with this online enterprise accelerated hasn’t helped. The pressures are many and the call for creativity high.

When faced with difficult circumstances we can spend a lot of time and energy worrying about what’s going to happen next or we can put our efforts to good use and turn as many negatives as possible into positives. Most of us will agree horse manure doesn’t seem like a positive. Stay near a barnyard for very long and you will smell the problem as well as see it.

Before all the modern conveniences we have today came along, farmers used every resource they could find to contribute to their day to day productivity and horse manure was no exception. We used to spread ours around the field with a tractor, breaking it down so it not only looked a lot better but reduced the odors and helped enrich the pasture soil a little bit too. Well, our tractor has fallen victim to our reduced earnings and had to be sold some time ago and we’ve had to do without it. The manure around here is not only abundant, it is also ugly and when summer comes, will also be smelly. Flies will likely be a problem too. For the past several years we gave our horses feed through fly control products (that worked great by the way) but I’m not sure the budget will bear that this time around. So we have looked to our history for help. What can we do with all this manure, a little bit of time and some creativity? Okay, and some work too…

We can collect it to build a nice compost pile in preparation for spreading in a garden, which is the first item on the agenda. We can collect it and bag it to offer to others either in trade for something else or a very modest fee to be used on other gardens (I heard from a friend in England whose son has been successfully using this method to earn pocket money from the family horses). Long range it offers an opportunity for an abundant garden, which in turn will yield food which will cut our grocery expenses, add a little more independence and also offer another bartering opportunity in trading the produce for other goods.

Did you know bartering is again becoming very popular? Many people are doing exactly what I’m doing. They are looking around and instead of seeing what they don’t have they are taking careful inventory of what they do have and finding ways to trade it for things they need and want. When we don’t have as much cash to work with this becomes a very affective method for getting things done and living a little more comfortably than if we just relied on cash.

Spend a couple of hours at craigslist.com, you will be amazed at what you can find there. It is fast becoming a healthy online thrift of sorts. The downside is it requires a lot of time to sift through everything being offered but sometimes all we have to contribute is time.

I would love to hear what your doing to stretch household resources and I’m sure anyone passing through here will want to hear it as well, afterall why else would someone read this article except to learn how to maximize resources.

Next, I’ll share the progress of gathering all this manure, managing what is sure to be a very large compost operation and how my little garden plan develops. I have no green thumb so this has great odds of providing a lot of entertainment value Oh, and I’ll share links to the resources I use to research this project, remember, I’ve never done this before.