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Re: mulch - about using straw and hay

Square Foot Gardening List - http://www.flinet.com/~gallus/sqft.html

On 10:59 AM 2/26/00, Katherine Wendt wrote:

 >Any recommended mulches for my vegetable garden that are beautiful too?

There are several recommendations and discussions about using hay and 
straw.  Here is a brief tutorial:

 From a livestock feeding perspective, there are 2 types of hay:  Grass hay 
and Legume hay.

Grass hay will have grass seeds!  Common grass hays include Oat, Wheat, 
Rye, Timmothy, and "grass" (local unseeded meadow that is cut, dried and 
baled).  Common Legume hays include Alfalfa and Clover.

Alfalfa and Clover are cut before blooming or while in bloom, and don't 
have viable seeds.  So you can use those hays as mulches without 
introducing seeds.  Grass hays are cut when the seed is set, because the 
nutrition value of these hays goes up when they have set seeds.  So you 
WILL get weeds if you use those hays as mulches in your yard.

Straw is grass hay that has been harvested for the grain (usually wheat) 
and then the remaining stalk cut and used for bedding.  Usually it is grain 
free.  However, if you have a field of grass hay that gets ruined (rained 
on after cutting, perhaps repeatedly, before becoming dry enough to bale) 
such that it looses much of its nutrition value for selling as feed, it 
will often be sold as bedding, and thus priced as and *called* straw.  You 
can tell the difference between straw and crappy grass hay sold as straw by 
looking at the bale and looking for any seed stalks.  Ask to see the hay 
stack, look for broken bales or a pile of loose hay and straw (at the base 
of the stack) to get a better idea of the nature of the inside of the bales.

Hay also often gets ruined (for feeding purposes) if it gets wet after 
baling.  Ruined bales sell for less or are often given away if there aren't 
a whole lot of non-horse people buying supplies from that given feed 
store.  If you want a "ruined bale" of Alfalfa, just ask.  Say "do you have 
any ruined Alfalfa you are giving away?".  You may be surprised how often 
you are just given the stuff if you will haul it away!  Always indicate 
that you are looking for hay or straw for your garden, because what is 
almost worthless to the person feeding livestock is often perfect for the 
gardener.  No point in their giving you a top (feed) quality bale (thinking 
you are feeding livestock) at top dollar when they have some hay stacked 
off in a corner that isn't suitable for feed.  If they know that this other 
hay is suitable for your needs, they may even offer to deliver it for free 
just to get rid of it!  You never know...

If you are using hay/straw as a mulch for your beds (and not paths) you 
might also want to look at pelleted feeds.  There are two types of pellets, 
those based on alfalfa and pellets based on oat/wheat/corn grains.  Again, 
ask if there are any spoiled bags.  If a stack of pellet bags got rained 
on, and some of the pellets along one side of the bag are damp and molding, 
the whole bag is unsuitable for horse feed.  But this is often perfect for 
the garden!  Take along a few hefty garbage bags so that if the ruined bags 
are splitting (soggy paper wrapping) you have something to decant the 
ruined bag into for taking home.  Again, this will almost always be given 
to you for free just for taking it away out of their hair.  Be sure to get 
the label (or write down the label info from a whole bag) so you know 
what's in the pellets and can adjust (if necessary) to avoid overloading 
your garden with too much of one kind of nutrient.  I believe that Alfalfa 
has lots of nitrogen, so you wouldn't want to use a high nitrogen 
fertilizer along with Alfalfa on your fruiting crops (although that would 
be perfect for your leaf crops like lettuce).

HTH

jc


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