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Hello all,

This week I want to talk dirty to you. Well more specifically I want to talk about good old-fashioned muck. Super gardener Cathy Evans arrived on Monday morning in my garden (alas one day too late for a mucky weekend) for MacAulay & Co's penultimate weekly garden item, bearing a bucket full of muck.

The topic of this week's item was fertiliser and the benefits - or not as the case may be - of off-the-shelf inorganic varieties as opposed to Mother Nature's very own organic ones. Cathy lives rurally and benefits from having farmers as neighbours so she can collect manure from horses and cows. Manure encourages good bacteria in the soil, it nourishes the earth and makes it more fertile. Whereas, in her opinion, the off-the-shelf ones tend not to do this and can leave the soil a little dried out.

Expert opinion about which provides the better manure, a cow or a horse, is a 50/50 split. Cows on one side and horses on the other, in a sort of Mexican stand-off perhaps. In Cathy's opinion the cows just edge it as horse manure is mixed with wood shavings which tend to take a little longer to break down. Both are good though, and you may wish to mix the two together, although Fred pointed out that if you were to do this, it would take a bit of explaining when quizzed in the pub later as to what you had spent your day doing.

Alternatively, you could go in search of a horse-cow. Not many of them around though, as far as I'm aware at least. What a sight that would be! So Cathy's advice is basically to visit your nearest stable or farm and ask for any spare animal dung. You can buy it in sacks from garden centres, but it does tend to be on the pricey side. Now, I've seen Cathy's fantastic terraced-vegetable garden and so her expertise is not in doubt, but to suggest that the best way to get the best organic farmyard manure is to go directly to the horse's mouth surely has to be called into question...! Ahem, sorry about that.

Now is a good time for applying fertilisers to your garden as the season is drawing to a close. Most veg has already been lifted, including my own red onions and radishes, and in fact the advantage of applying manure now is that you can just leave it on the surface of your garden and the worms will do the rest! No need for any digging or forking, let the little perishers' save your back, while you sit down and have a cuppa, preferably not in the garden if the recent weather is to continue, mind.

I was going to leave you with a picture of Cathy's excellent muck bucket, but I'll leave it to your imagination. Instead here's a a couple of nice photos of horses and cows.

Horses and cows: The Royal Highland Show 2010

Next Monday 12th Sept my novice garden adventure as documented on MacAulay & Co comes to end so join me if you can to find out what conclusions we can draw from the experience, and also hear how I do on the quiz Fred has in store for me. Final garden blog next week and until then, happy gardening!