Horse
dung - probably one of the most widely used
manures as it was the most widely available. Horse dung
from London's streets and gardens, for example, provided
the market gardens surrounding London with over 60 tons
of manure per acre per year. Horse manure was at its
best once it had fermented a little - most gardeners
advised against using it fresh.
Cattle
dung - often particularly recommended for very
dry and sandy soils.
Compost
- almost all working Victorian gardens had at least
one large compost heap. Often scraps of vegetation or
cast aside vegetables were not composted as such, but
merely cut up and dug straight into the soil. Green
crops, pond weeds, hedge parings and fresh cut lawn
clippings needed no composting at all according to advice
- they could be added direct to the flower or vegetable
plot.
Seaweed
- particularly recommended for vegetable gardens.
Bird
dung - this was highly popular, and several
families made their fortune by importing massive quantities
of guano from South America. Otherwise gardeners made
do with pigeon dung (often available in quantities,
and recommended for strawberries in particular).
Sheep
and deer dung - not often used in urban gardens
as it was hard to procure, it was used widely in rural
areas. It needed to be dug in quickly while still fresh
so as to retain all its moisture and nutrients.
Soot
- another widely available commodity in pre-electrical
Britain. Most people depended on coal fires for cooking,
and the soot could be sprinkled over the surface of
the garden. Soot was not only considered a very powerful
fertilizer, gardeners also believed it acted as a deterrent
to wire-worms and maggots.
Crushed
bone and horn - shavings of bone or horn were
believed to provide an excellent manure but were difficult
to procure in useful quantities.
Blood
- always popular as a gardening fertilizer. Gardeners
could collect blood in vast quantities at slaughter
houses and butchers, and also at confectionary manufacturers
where cattle blood was used to separate out the impurities
in brown sugar. Of course, slaughter houses were not
the only places blood could be obtained. Useful contacts
could be made in the wards and theatres of hospitals,
and buckets of blood for the flower bed obtained via
the back door. This practice went on so late as the
early 1980s, when one of the editors of this site recalls
watching a theatre sister handing buckets of blood out
the back door to the hospital housekeeper, who kept
the hibiscus in the front garden of the hospital in
spectacular bloom with patients' blood dug in during
the dark hours.
Salt
- a debate raged over whether or not salt was good or
bad for the garden. Patently, as there was a debate
over it, some gardeners did use salt as a fertilizer,
but increasingly by the early nineteenth century opinion
was turning against the use of salt in soil.
Urine
- whether animal or human, it needed to be used quickly
before it 'putrefied'. Gardeners believed it should
be diluted with water. Today, of course, we use it neat
on our compost heaps.
Wood
ash and charcoal dust - often obtained in considerable
quantities from lime or brick kilns.
Sawdust,
tanner's bark and wood shavings.
Lime
- used as quick lime, or mild lime.Lime was used more
in sandy soils than clay based soils.
Coal
was also often used.
A
recipe for a cheap and useful fertilizer was
as follows:
