straw as mulch

[the1honeycomb]

I have read a lot of articles that recommend straw as mulch I tried this last year but still have large tuffs of grass from the straw. Do I have to prepare the straw or should I just not worry and pull the grass to use as green fertilizer?

 

[Ridgerunner]

Up to you. I use wheat straw which still has some seeds in it. Not many but some and they will sprout. Sometimes I use it as it is and sometimes I prepare it. It is usually not that hard to pull the green stuff up if you mulch and don't wait a long time before you pull it..

I may prepare it two ways. A fun one is that I put the bale in the chicken run and remove the wire. In a couple of days the chickens have shredded the bale. They eat some of the seeds and thresh many more just with their scratchng. I just rake it up and use it direct in the garden. I still get a few sprouts but not many at all.

Often I store the bales outside where it will rain on them. The seeds near the outside of the bale will sprout and die. If you store it long enough the inside will start to rot but it still has several seeds that will sprout.

This is wheat straw. I don't use oat, rice, or some other type.

To me , the benefits of mulching greatly outweigh the problems from the seeds sprouting, especially of you take care of them when they are pretty young.

 

[jomoncon]

I'm still trying to work out the difference between straw & hay. Hay is intended for feed & has seeds. Straw supposedly has no seeds or much fewer. Or is it the other way around?

I tried composting with hay one year & it made a mess. I never thought about using it as mulch. I'll have to look into this.

Ridgerunner, I love your idea of letting the chickens get to it first. I think I'll give this a try.

 

[seedcorn]

Hay in the midwest is alfalfa or grass/alfalfa mixed where plants were alive, cut down, allowed to dry for a few days, then baled. In the deep south, grass only is considered hay. We also sell grass hay in the north mainly for horses. Hay will have less of a chance of having weed seeds in it.

Straw is the plant remains baled after the seeds have been harvested. The main 2 straws are wheat or oat (not much of that except in northern states or Canada). Farmers up here are now baling corn stalks for bedding as well. Wheat straw spreads the easiest, lightest and stops sunight the best. IMHO. Oat straw is itchy to me and very hard to locate--as if I would try.

 

[Durgan]

I have read a lot of articles that recommend straw as mulch I tried this last year but still have large tuffs of grass from the straw. Do I have to prepare the straw or should I just not worry and pull the grass to use as green fertilizer?

Straw can be a pain to handle after its mulching function is done. It also can mat and is difficult to handle in many situations. If I do use it which is not often any more, I put it through the chipper/shredder to reduce before working into the soil. Now I use wood chips which have been mulched in a pile for about a year.

http://www.durgan.org/URL/?GLJCP 26 May 2012 Garden all Mulched.
Finished mulching the vegetable garden with wood chips. My primary purpose is to retain moisture. Plants were hand watered by pail as deemed necessary. The moisture situation is almost critical, since there was only one reasonable rain during April and May. This is not anywhere near normal for this area.

http://www.durgan.org/URL/?VLAFP 21 May 2012 Yard. Heavy Wood Chip Mulching
My plants are all heavily mulched with wood chips. It is preferable to heavily mulch the vegetable garden after a heavy rainfall. But mulching any time is beneficial.Mulching for conditioning soil is probably the most important single operation that can be practised. It is found that the mulch disappears in about a year and I am constantly replenishing.I do no use the long term mulch like cedar or similar. I want the product to break down and improve the soil. In my small yard I use about 15 cubic yards each year.In addition compost is added as required. If the wood chips are worked into the soil in the Fall, I add a bit of urea (Nitrogen) to replenish the nitrogen used in the composting of the wood chips. Bare, exposed soil is neither beneficial to man or plant.

 

[Ridgerunner]

To me, hay is has not been threshed and is harvested with the thought of retaining the seeds. Straw has been threshed. Threshing removes most seeds but not necessarily all. How much seeds comes out depends on variety and species, how ripe it is, and probably how moist it is. I've never been around true threshing for harvest, just at fairs and exhibitions. I imagine you can find straw for about every variety of grain that is grown somewhere in the world. I've heard that rice straw is fairly common some places in the southeast.

Seedcorn, in East Tennessee Dad's first hay cutting was pretty much Orchard Grass. We only got two cuttings a year. The second cutting was either Lespedeza and Red Clover or Fescue and Red Clover or sometimes Lespadeza, Fescus and Red Clover. We fed both to the plow horses and cows.

One of the neighbors would even bail soybeans. I hated those. The soybeans never really dried out enough to bale and he would have to bust the bails apart when they got to the barn or they would get really hot. The concern was spontaneous combustion. The reasons I hated them was that the bales would be really heavy and hard to handle since they were wet and the fine dry leaves would get all over you and really itch. Still I needed that $0.50 per hour he paid me to help get his hay up so I went after that job.

I also don't like oat straw, but not for your reason. That stuff is slick! On year Dad grew oats. We put it in the barn as loose hay, not threshed and not baled. When we hauled loose hay, my job was to stack it on the horse-drawn hay wagon. Dad threw it up on the wagon with a pitchfork and I spread it out. The only load of loose hay I ever lost any of was one of those loads of oats.

I was probably 11 or 12 so that was many decades ago, but I'm still defensive about that. Oats are slick, it was going uphill, and Dad jerked the wagon when he started the horses, but it was my job to stack it so it did not come off. I failed.

 

[seedcorn]

Ridge sounds like we both grew up in the same time of $.50/hour wages. Each area of the country has their own definitions of what is straw, what is hay and what is haylage.

Usually haylage is harvested wet, stored in bunkers or bagged. Their the seed is kept on, fed as grain/silage.

Hay is cut premature seed development. If the hay is cut after seed development, the plant is less desirable as the stems are woodier and not good feed.

Straw is cut after seed is harvested and the stalks are used for bedding because they absorb a decent amount of moisture before detiorating. The reason straw-up here-has more weed seed is that the machines cannot seperate weed seed from the stalk so are still on there when you bale the stalks. Thistles are really bad as I started a bunch in my garden and I have no one but myself to blame as I hand picked it and should have left that area of the field.......dumb, dumb, dumb.

Interesting take on wood chips for moisture storage. I can see where they would but the amount of nitrogen tied up as the microbes use it ot break down the fibers would be too much for me in a vegetable garden where I use my straw mulch. Now I do use wood mulch in my flower beds because of the same reason. It ties up the moisture so weeds don't get it and because it's above ground, the microbes don't work as fast on it. The only thing I like straw mulch better is that insects don't seem to like it as well as wood mulch.

 

[Ridgerunner]

I also use wood chips. I put fresh wood chips on my landscaping beds every spring after taking the old ones up. I then use the year old ones in the garden, usually with tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, or maybe okra. The timing seems to work out for them.

Before I put the wood chips down, I spread a couple of layers of newspaper. I don't know how beneficial that newspaper really is. I think it does help retain moisture and helps keep the weeds and grass from growing through the mulch, though pulling weeds or even grass isn't too hard if it is mulched pretty well. I think it also helps keep the wood chips up put of the soil so it does not tie up so much nitrogen. The wood chips and newspaper are gone by the time I turn the soil the next spring.

I try to not use newspaper with a lot of color photos, colored comic strips, or colored advertisements. Some of those colored inks can have some stuff in the dye that I don't want in the garden. I think yellow is about the worst but I avoid as much of the colors as I can.

 

[vfem]

I am very much ok with using straw, for the hassle of pulling some strays in the spring... its cheap! Sometimes even free. I see people use it for fall decor in their yards and by Thanksgiving it looks horrible for I grab it up for the winter beds and the compost pile.

I find it easy to rake off my beds in the spring, or simply turn under when I till. I also pile up a few extra bales by the back deck for the cat to lay in during the colder months. She has her very own little nest.

When I see the diversity of what I need it for, I get a lot of positives out of my purchase. This year I got 3 free bales and I 4 extra. 2 are at the back part of the deck for the cat, but if I need it they are there.

It also makes a nice winter crop!

 

[thistlebloom]

I use straw all the time. I think it makes a great mulch, and agree with Ridgerunner that the seeds that sprout are easy to pull. A lot easier to pull than if I didn't use mulch and had to pull a million weeds. It's simple enough to rake aside into the path ways in the spring to warm the soil, then pull back up around the plants, or leave as a path mulch and use fresh straw for the summer.

I also use it stacked in the bale as a winter wind break for the dog run. Those bales get used through the winter as bedding for the livestock and then it eventually makes it's way into the garden. Up here it costs anywhere from $2 a bale picked up from the farmers field to $5 bale at the feed store. I have to admit to not being observant enough to tell oat from straw until I see sprouts, but I have used both and am fine with either.