There are many options available for garden fertilizers, and whether you’re buying it from the store or collecting it from your own goats, you may be wondering whether goat manure is a good fertilizer.
The question is a reasonably complex one, so let’s try and answer it here.
So, is goat manure a good fertilizer?
Yes, goat manure is a good fertilizer. It is beneficial for the soil, containing many of the nutrients that plants need to grow well. Urine also collects in goat droppings, helping it to retain more nitrogen—but not too much. It is also a cold fertilizer, meaning it can be directly added to the soil without composting.
While it is perhaps not the best fertilizer in all cases, the fact is that goat manure is a great fertilizer with many advantages.
Especially if you have your own goats, using their manure for fertilizer is a no-brainer!
Let’s look further into this.
What is the best manure for fertilizer?
This is a broad question with many potential answers, but unfortunately, the answer probably is not goat manure.
That said, goat manure is still among the best kinds of manure you can use for plants.
It’s nutritious, with a good nitrogen content to prevent burning plants and a strong pH balance to stop the soil from becoming acidic.
However, widely considered the best manure for farms and gardens is horse manure.
It is a great source of organic matter that plants need to grow optimally and is widely used in industrial-scale farms.
However, for your own purposes, horse manure may even be unnecessarily nutritious.
It is used in big crop farming operations, where profit is the number one concern.
For you, if you’re just trying to grow your begonias a bit larger, then goat manure will do just fine.
Other manures that are considered extremely high quality are cow, rabbit, and sheep manures—any of these make great choices for your garden.
What nutrients are in goat manure?
Goat manure may not be considered the best fertilizer, but it has many advantages that others do not.
Nitrogen is one of the big things, but also the way goats metabolize it compared with other animals.
Goat manure has around 22 pounds of nitrogen per ton, compared to 10 pounds per ton for cow manure.
Goat manure is also much higher in potassium than other kinds of manure, which is really important for plant growth.
Basically, trace amounts of whatever nutrients the goat eats will be in its manure.
The minerals are the most important parts, though, as well as the nitrogen content.
There are plenty of nutrients in small amounts of goat manure.
How long before you can use goat manure as fertilizer?
Unfortunately, this can depend on who you ask.
As long as your goats have manure that is low enough in nitrogen that you won’t burn the plant, many would suggest you can simply put goat manure directly on the soil to fertilize it.
This is unlike chicken manure, which everyone agrees absolutely must be composted before it can be put on the soil.
Many would suggest, though, that goat manure always must be composted before it can be used as a supplement.
If you are being safe, this is probably the best way to go.
Ideally, you should let the manure compost for around 120 days or 4 to 6 months.
This allows it to break down sufficiently so as not to damage plants.
It can also depend on what you’re growing, though.
In general, my advice would be to compost it just to make sure there’s no chance of burning the plants.
However, if you are impatient, you can always test some uncomposted manure on a small patch of soil and see how the plants react.
How do you use goat manure in the garden?
Again, it depends.
For best results, it’s safest to compost the manure first, and then simply spread that manure on what you want to fertilize.
However, the other question is about where on the soil you apply the compost.
You can apply it directly on top of the soil bed, and since it is in pellet form before it is composted, this does make it easier to apply this way—if you are opting not to compost it.
Just evenly distribute it across the plant bed.
You can also apply it beneath the surface, near the roots of the plant.
For this, I would definitely recommend composting it first or you could burn the roots.
Is goat manure acid or alkaline?
Goat manure is alkaline, or it would certainly burn what you were trying to fertilize.
Goat manure pH is generally somewhere in the range of 8.9-7.8 pH, making it quite balanced but ultimately more alkaline than acidic.
This balance is one of the most important things in its benefit as a fertilizer, since it is balanced enough to provide the necessary chemicals, but not so acidic that it can damage the plant.
The short answer is yes, then.
Goat manure is an excellent fertilizer for a wide variety of reasons.
That said, it probably isn’t the best in terms of sheer nutrient content.
But it will still do wonders for your plants, and there are many advantages over some of the more nutritious manures, like chicken manure, that make up for it.
Don’t hesitate to try it on your garden.