Straw mulch..

[Jonrek]

Hello everyone,

i have a question about straw mulch? what kind of plants is this? i mean where can you get straw normally? i would like to make mulch from it? never used it really...

i dont know if they sell here in the nursery, i would like to look for my self or going in the farm maybe..

 

[Ridgerunner]

Straw is the stem of a grain that has been threshed to remove the seed. The seed is the part we eat. The ones I’m familiar with are wheat and oats straw. The one I use for mulch is wheat straw. I’d think where you are your choice is pretty much going to be rice straw. That should work fine.

Threshing does not remove 100% of the seeds but it gets almost all of them. I’ll have a few wheat plants grow when I mulch, but one of the benefits of mulch is that it makes it easy to pull those out when you see them as long as you don’t let them get big and established.

 

[digitS']

I don't want to act as though I know a great deal about this but I have grown grain crops both in farm fields and in the garden. I tried making better use of those plants as a mulch last year.

Wheat and oats, among others, grow quickly during the cool spring weather. They can also be out of the way quickly, especially, if you are not growing them to mature as grain.

If you have the room, and there is often quite a bit of room in the areas of the garden where we are planting warm-season crops like squash and tomatoes, we could start off with something like oats there.

We can grow our own mulch. At first it would be a "living mulch." By the time the tomatoes and squash need more room, it could be pulled and become what we usually think of as mulch, the dry stems and leaves.

Where we can get in trouble is being lazy and not pulling those grain plants. They would crowd our tomatoes and squash and likely go to seed. It is, however, easy to pull the plants by hand when they are at a good height.

I did this in my pumpkins last year. The only things to be careful about are to sow the grain crop very early and pull the plants before they cause any trouble for your vegetables. You may also need to go through and turn the "mulch" over so that it doesn't re-root itself and begin to grow again. At the right stage, it doesn't take much to kill it, however.

Steve

 

[ninnymary]

I use rice straw every year to mulch my plants with. I am very happy using it. I also use it in the chicken nest boxes.

Mary

 

[seedcorn]

I use wheat straw. Here it is winter wheat which means you plant in September. Here we would have to kill it before it went to seed. Then it would tie up nitrogen.

 

[ducks4you]

I like using straw as mulch, but I usually use it after it's been first used as horse bedding, and then piled up for 4-5 months with manure and urine, so it's kind of mulch/compost. I reuse something that I bought and used already.
Honestly, I've been trying lots of things for mulch, but I don't like to have to pull plants that grow from the seeds. I like using grass clippings but if you're not careful you are growing grass in your vegetable beds. Then you have to weed it, and who needs that?
I like to mow my mint bed for mulch, but I need to use THAT before IT goes to seed, too, for the same reason.
Straw can help to warm up a bed, but so can clear plastic bags, or opaque ones. I've read up on many articles that say that only black plastic will prevent growth. If you use clear or opaque, you are creating a greenhouse, and a better one that straw will provide.
Straw, I think, is really nice when you plant little lightweight seeds and you want to protect them from spring winds.
Just MHO.

 

[digitS']

I once worked for a neighbor with several hundred acres of grass. No, this was lawn grass and back in the days when the fields could be legally burned, making it possible for the neighbor and others to grow the crop profitably.

Before my adventure there, I stopped by and "rescued" a couple of broken bales to use for the garden. Serious, serious mistake! If I had wanted to change the garden into a lawn, it would have been the way to go!

Steve

 

[catjac1975]

I went to the Boston Flower show last weekend. A display showed some great straw mulch bales From Lucern Farms in Maine. It is shredded and heated to destroy seeds, mold, and pathogens. Great stuff but very expensive.? 16.00 a bale-I did not even lift it to see how compacted it is.

 

[so lucky]

The last bale of straw I bought from the feed store has such short little straws in it, the whole thing is barely holding together. It looks like they swept up the scraps and tied a string around them. That stuff will all end up in my neighbor's yard, across the field, as soon as I cut the string. Grrrr!

 

[ducks4you]

Mine is still stuck to the decomposing manure and doesn't really go anywhere.
But...I've past "frugel" and I am now "cheap."