How Do You Grow Hay ?

[Nyboy]

I have never seen seeds for hay in the seed stands. I have a few chickens that nest in it. How do I growit?

 

[digitS']

You may be able to find wheat seed easily enough at your garden center or health food store, Nyboy. "Wheatgrass" is wheat.

This would be an annual crop.

If you cut it before it begins to make seed, it will be "hay." If you don't need it all for hay, the chickens will enjoy the grain and the straw is usable.

Steve

 

[catjac1975]

Any good farm supply store should have various seed mixtures. I don't know if the national companies sell what's best regionally but, I would think they do. Agway and the like.

 

[bobm]

What you are refering to is STRAW from the dead stems of the wheat plant after the mature wheat grain is harvested. Straw is very cheap as it is a waste product from growing wheat. Basically cellulose with almost no nutritional value. Purchasing a bale of straw is much cheaper than you could grow yourself. In Cal. an equal mix of wheat, oats, and barley seeds grown to the doagh stage of the wheat grain ( waist high stems are still green and soft) is cut and harvested for hay that is very popular and nutritous as feed for horses. Second only to alfalfa. row

 

[Nyboy]

Thanks guys cityboy here.

 

[baymule]

Here in good ol' HOT Texas, hay is cut dried grass.......no, not THAT kind of dried grass. Bermuda, bahia and other grasses make the best hay here along the coastal areas. The grass is cut with a mower attachment on the tractor that cuts the grass low, close to the ground and does not chop it up like a lawnmower does. It dries several days, then is raked into winrows, which means it is raked into long piles or rows, then the tractor is driven alongside the winrows with a baler attachment. The bales are either square or the big round bales.

Straw has already been well explained.

Unless you want to do a lot of hand cutting, sweating, have sore muscles and get really really tired and dirty, just go buy it. I get all that just from buying 100 square bales and hauling it from the field to our feed shed.

 

[Ridgerunner]

What you are refering to is STRAW from the dead stems of the wheat plant after the mature wheat grain is harvested. Straw is very cheap as it is a waste product from growing wheat. Basically cellulose with almost no nutritional value. Purchasing a bale of straw is much cheaper than you could grow yourself. In Cal. an equal mix of wheat, oats, and barley seeds grown to the doagh stage of the wheat grain ( waist high stems are still green and soft) is cut and harvested for hay that is very popular and nutritous as feed for horses. Second only to alfalfa. row

BobM, are you sitting down?

My local Garden Center sells a bale of wheat straw, maybe a 60 pound bale, for $7 a bale. That is threshed and baled wheat straw. Since it is mainly a waste product you'd think it would be a lot cheaper. I have not looked for a cheaper source around here.

NyBoy, I don't know where you live or your circumstances, but maybe you can cut grass this summer when it gets knee high or taller and dry it. That works in the chicken nests really well. If you get it before the seeds mature, that's hay. If you get it after the seeds mature, the seeds can be threshed out and that's straw. If it has seeds in it you want to disappear, just throw it in the chicken run for a couple of days. The chickens will eat a lot of the seeds and do the threshing for you by scratching it.

Or just buy it. One bale goes a long way in chicken nests.

 

[Nyboy]

LOL will keep buying it. where I live grass knee high would be a ticket from the city. Lawns are cut once a week.

 

[Smiles Jr.]

Nyboy - around here hay is a term used for many different kinds of vegetation used to feed livestock. Other areas of the country use slightly different terms to describe the same thing. Orchard grass, Timothy grass, Rye grass, Alfalfa, Wheat, and various other grass-like plants are cut close to the ground with specially designed mowers and the stalks are allowed to lay in the field until the moisture content is right for bailing. If the cuttings are too damp the hay will spoil and rot after bailing. Hence the old saying "making hay while the sun shines". Some animals don't seem to care if the hay is slightly rotted and some animals won't touch it. With many feed grasses we have first cutting, second cutting, and sometimes we can get a third cutting. Usually the first cutting is the best quality but not always.

A homeowner can use a mower (although the typical lawn mower will tend to "mulch" the cuttings into fine pieces which are harder to bail) to collect hay. But remember the grass must be allowed to dry thoroughly before you bail it. You know how moist new grass cuttings are and how quickly the grass will smell spoiled if piled up when wet? Let it dry as much as possible in the sun and wind then pack it into a homebrew small hand bailer and make tiny bails that are just right for feeding small animals like rabbits, sheep, etc. You can find all sorts of info. on making small hand bailers. It's kind of fun if you have the time.

Straw, on the other hand, is just throw-away stuff from harvesting and winnowing wheat or other wheat-like crops. After the seeds are harvested the remaining bare stalks are bailed as straw. Almost no nutritional value but some animals (like goats) eat it anyway. If there is hay available in the feed trough most animals will not eat the straw.

 

[seedcorn]

Ridge, the reason straw is now expensive is that selling the straw off of an acre costs the farmer around $150 in fertilizer, plus the cost of baling (go price baler twine), labor to stack on wagon, haul to barn, restack in barn. Then the labor to stack it onto truck to haul to whatever market you have (don't forget auctuoneer's $) then farmers profit. Now the reseller has to pay labor to stack it and his profit. Then how much profit can you make to make it worth the effort.

In past, farmers thought when they sold it for $2/bale, they were making money. Huge surprise when they found out how much fertilizer they gave away.

NYboy, if you know someone with pine trees, the needles when dried make an excellent liner for nests.