Rabbit poop is here to stay!

[Budsbunny]

Hello all, yes…..rabbit poop is here to stay…… Before to go deeper in this topic, a bit of history and about me because sometimes it is hard for people to understand why I go a certain route, understandable, as a lot of times I ask that myself (afterwards…. ).

I am a retired innovator, made my bread and butter with my ideas and never ever used or grow cannabis in my life until mid-August 2019. At that time I saw a post on Internet (actually it was from this forum) about using one of those rotating gardens and as my blood if still full on innovation A-pos, I decided to make one. The plants are flowering now in it, had to learn a lot of things the hard way but I was used to that.

I also started a few plants using an ultra cool mister instead of real misters, the project was not a real success, those misters are good to increase the RH in your tent but that’s it.

Did a lot of experimenting with LED household bulbs with great success, I am growing all my plants with them, all topics above are floating in this forum somewhere if you are interested.

Sooooo….rabbit droppings, brew or tea……yes, my plants, although in an early stage are growing well with rabbit tea as a supplement, or in rabbit based compost, which I have a lot of.
It started a few weeks ago, had a little clone, almost a mini clone of 1.5” that I accidentally cooked with a wrong setting of my heat-mat, I threw it out but later in the day I regret doing that and fished it out of the garbage again, I shortened it and let it root in a glass of water. After that I decided to give a grow in soil a chance and put it in rabbit based compost from a big pile I had in my garden. The compost is full with rabbit droppings (the previous owner of my house raised rabbits), egg shells, peanut shells, rabbit bones, open walnuts and probably more stuff that I don’t know of. The pile is also FULL of worms and is at least 6 years not used.

Here you see the first results after the little seedling went into the rabbit compost:

In a chest I have a seedling in R-DWC and it is now getting a little bit of rabbit tea as a supplement, you see the results below on the right. The leaves came up during the following night and this plant is doing very well.

I also did a comparison on pepper plants, 2 with rabbit tea and 2 without, see below, at start they all had the same height.

In this journal I will update you about rabbit droppings, how I do things, how I store it, to dose it in soil and hydro etc etc. I will update at least twice a week and if you are interested, you are more than welcome to join me. Oh..... and in case you did not know, rabbit manure is one of the best fertilizers that you can get….

Cheers

 

[BakedARea]

Very nice comparison photos! Looking forward to seeing the progress on this. It would be great to see if we can find some analyzed raw rabbit manure to see what the compounds look like and then analyze it at various stages of decomposition in a compost pile. Good luck and keep up the good work on your projects.

 

[Budsbunny]

Very nice comparison photos! Looking forward to seeing the progress on this. It would be great to see if we can find some analyzed raw rabbit manure to see what the compounds look like and then analyze it at various stages of decomposition in a compost pile. Good luck and keep up the good work on your projects.

Thanks,
You can find analysis of rabbit manure on the Internet. It was not even my intention to make a tea, just in the compost (because I had it) and water it, but after I saw the progress of the little clone in the compost I realized that I could make a liquid fertilizer from droppings and dose that to a plant. In that way you can control the strength and the dose. BTW, rabbit manure is a COLD manure, you can use droppings immediately if you like, no need to compost it first.

There is a lot of information on the Internet about rabbit manure, several people sell droppings on Etsy, Ebay and Amazon. I’ve had 4 rabbits myself in the past, I know only one is enough for me to grow 4 – 6 plants during the year. If you have 2, you could bread them, sell what you have too much and eat the rabbits when they are big. Or better, find a breeder and buy some droppings, perhaps you even get them for free.

 

[BakedARea]

Good to know about it being cold manure! I have a buddy that breeds and sells rabbit meat for human and pet consumption. I will ask him about bagging me up some manure. I will give it a go with a plant, why not?! I'll have a control plant and a rabbit poo plant. Thanks again for the suggestion.

 

[Budsbunny]

Good to know about it being cold manure! I have a buddy that breeds and sells rabbit meat for human and pet consumption. I will ask him about bagging me up some manure. I will give it a go with a plant, why not?! I'll have a control plant and a rabbit poo plant. Thanks again for the suggestion.

You tell that buddy that he is your BEST friend....
You could even dilute the concentrate and start with a foliar spray.
I don't have time now but I am going to show how I will make the the concentrate etc, it will come.
Happy with the "reinforcement" in efforts.

 

[BakedARea]

@Budsbunny Already got a response from him...he will have a few bags of it ready for me by Monday! Woooo! I also have an extensive veggie garden and many fruit trees. I will give it a shot with some veggie plants and see how it does first. Exciting to find another potential amendment for my soil that I will have regular access too and FREE! Hopefully, I will be able to replicate the same success you have experienced while using it.

 

[Modest Grower]

I wonder if deer poop would work. I have bunnies in my yard but way more deer poop available haha either way, great post!

 

[Budsbunny]

I wonder if deer poop would work. I have bunnies in my yard but way more deer poop available haha either way, great post!

Maybe we should not go into different poops, because I have a feeling where that will end.....

Here is a part of a post on Michigan State University about rabbit manure:

"
Here are a few facts about rabbit manure:

• Rabbit manure has four times more nutrients than cow or horse manure and is twice as rich as chicken manure. Cow, horse and chicken manure are considered “hot” and need to be composted (well-rotted) to use as fertilizers.
• One of the best things about rabbit manure is it doesn’t need to be composted.
• Rabbit manure is organic matter and improves poor soil structure, drainage and moisture retention.
• It improves the life cycle of microorganisms in the soil.
• Worms love rabbit manure.
• It is not as smelly as other manures and is easy to handle.
• One doe and her offspring can produce a ton of manure in one year. That’s a lot of bunny honey.
• Rabbit manure is packed with nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, minerals and micronutrients.
• It contains beneficial trace elements such as calcium, magnesium, boron, zinc, manganese, sulfur, copper and cobalt, just to name a few.
• Nitrogen (N). Rabbit manure is higher in nitrogen than sheep, goat, chicken, cow or horse manure. Plants need nitrogen to produce strong green growth.
• Phosphorus (P). Rabbit manure is also higher in phosphorus than the other manures. It helps with the transformation of solar energy to chemical energy. Phosphorus also helps plants to withstand stress and contributes to more and bigger blossoms, and is great for root growth.
• Potassium (K). Potassium helps with fruit quality and reducing disease; plants will not grow without it."

 

[BakedARea]

@Modest grower You know...I bet it would be great. If you have no concerns about what they have eaten, I imagine their manure would be similar considering their diet. Great consideration. Rake some up, make a team and try it out with a tomato plant. See if you can have 2-4 plants. 2 as the control with your regular fertilizer and 2 with the deer manure tea or maybe even a top dressing of it. See how they perform! That's what I was going to do with the rabbit manure. I was also going to test it on some squash and cucumber plants. As well as some leafy greens since they are faster growers and I could compare the taste of them as well. Nutrient uptake will become important the longer that fertilizer is available to the plant and I want to see how it will change the flavors, soil pH, etc.

 

[BakedARea]

@Budsbunny Thanks for getting that excerpt and posting it here! That's sounds amazing already. Looks like I need to get some of my own rabbits now!

 

[Budsbunny]

@Modest grower You know...I bet it would be great. If you have no concerns about what they have eaten, I imagine their manure would be similar considering their diet. Great consideration. Rake some up, make a team and try it out with a tomato plant. See if you can have 2-4 plants. 2 as the control with your regular fertilizer and 2 with the deer manure tea or maybe even a top dressing of it. See how they perform! That's what I was going to do with the rabbit manure. I was also going to test it on some squash and cucumber plants. As well as some leafy greens since they are faster growers and I could compare the taste of them as well. Nutrient uptake will become important the longer that fertilizer is available to the plant and I want to see how it will change the flavors, soil pH, etc.

I am doing those tests already on peppers and cannabis. With the cannabis I cannot compare yet as i dose it to all of them, but I have 2 clones rooting and once they go into the soil I will do one without and one with rabbit manure

 

[BubbleBucketz]

Does the rabbits diet matter? Say one that eats vegetables to one that eats hay?

 

[Budsbunny]

No idea but I don't think it matters a lot for the droppings. I had some rabbits in the past and gave them pellets with alfa alfa hay and I also gave them alfa alfa hay, but these were rabbits for consumption, to increase maximum growth.

Note that, handling dry droppings is easy and clean with no real smell, but breading rabbits STICKS LIKE HELL.

 

[BubbleBucketz]

No idea but I don't think it matters a lot for the droppings. I had some rabbits in the past and gave them pellets with alfa alfa hay and I also gave them alfa alfa hay, but these were rabbits for consumption, to increase maximum growth.

Note that, handling dry droppings is easy and clean with no real smell, but breading rabbits STICKS LIKE HELL.

Gets you thinking about feeding the rabbits foods that are high in nitrogen and the others the plant needs. Following along though to see what you can do with some crap lol. Good luck.

 

[Budsbunny]

You guys are going WAY too fast for me, I intended to complete my update and how far I am and what I did during the coming week. I will see if I can do a quick update on the little clone in soil, have to take some pics.

 

[Budsbunny]

OK so here we go, this is a picture of the little clone in rabbit compost, just AFTER I watered it with water + rabbit tea.
I don't have a bigger picture any more, sorry.

These are 2 pictures of the same little clone 2 days later (taken just now) after using rabbit tea for 2 days.

As you can see, I topped this little one at the same time on April 1

The "tea"

I took HALF a yogurt container with droppings and let that soak in 3 liters of (warm) water (= 3000 ml), you can use some sort of bag so it is easy to take it out again.
I added 40 ml of this concentrate to almost 1 liter of water and watered the plant with that.
The concentrate says 2100 ppm on my BlueLab meter but I do not think the tea gives a reliable readout, about that later.
So you see that with only half a yogurt container you can water a lot, in the other way, maybe we could dilute less and put 60 ml in the water, we have to find out.

 

[Budsbunny]

I have a few minutes, so here is another observation.

You CANNOT dose the rabbit tea with the help of a ppm meter. When I wanted to make the 1 liter batch for the little clone (soon not little any more...), I took 1 liter of tap / well water (450 ppm) and started to add the tea with a syringe, each time 3 ml. After 2 syringes my ppm meter gave 470 ppm (+ 20 ppm right?) After 4 syringes still 470 ppm. To make a long story short, after 13 syringes (40 ml) it still read 470 ppm.

So this means you have to dose the tea by volume, in this case 40 ml on 1000 ml water. And the concentrated tea had a strength of 2100 ppm but I don't know how to value that. Just do half a yogurt container in 3 liters of water.

 

[Rayi]

Walnuts are a big no no. They have a substance called Jugalone. It retards the growth of other plants so the can grow without competition. That's why few things grow under a walnut tree

 

[Budsbunny]

These are all empty walnut shells in a compost pile of 6 years old. It is what it is and my clone likes it.

 

[Budsbunny]

April 4, 2020

I have watered the clone again this morning, this time I have increased the dose with 1.5x compared to last time. I have put 60 ml of concentrate into 1 liter well/tap water. The picture taken like this is a good one I guess to see the development in growth. It was topped on April 1.

Please note: I am not a “know it all”, I started using rabbit tea only recently and despite good results, you cannot use this post as a “rabbit tea bible”, more information has to be developed, preferably by more growers. I see very good results but I don’t have 2 cannabis plants, one with, and one without rabbit tea. Also, I have used "rabbit based compost" as soil to put this little clone in, no coco coir or perlite (which I deeply regret), but it is what it is I guess.