The other day the farmer who's been having the hay dropped off his load of muck as payment and also a large straw bale.
This I wanted for the chicken bedding and a few wet patches where I walk daily. I find that even though I produce loads of shavings they work best when I put down a bed of straw first, otherwise it'll just sink away.
Obviously a big square bale has a fair bit of straw in it, more than I can store without a barn. Some went in the spare and empty bays of the big compost bins. The rest I had a bit of a plan for.
I've talked about using the strips between my dwarf(ish) fruit cordons. Where I planted the 18 pear trees last year and already had the dozen or so plums growing. I wanted to do some field crops there. I'd rather not plough the patch if I can help it (and don't have the means to do it), so making the area workable is best started now.
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| The chickens seem to have found the bales pretty quickly. |
I thought using the straw as a mulch could work well, possibly...
There's no way all the straw will rot in the months up until spring (it's a wheat straw), so chances are I might end up raking this off, but hopefully it'll kill the grass off. That's if I've put it thick enough and if we get rain before a high wind! Always a risk. I don't have enough to do all three rows (I could do four but the one will be shaded), so I might find some other ways of mulching, I may even go back to the wool mulch.
I'm not sure what I'll plant in these wide rows yet. One will be definitely be squash, as it's good at keeping weeds down and also needs plenty of space. I hope to plant a good range and plant a "grex" that I can let cross to save seeds from for future growing experiments, but also to have enough for us for the year.
So I guess that leaves some thinking for the other rows, it's not rabbit proof so that will need thinking about. Ideally I'd love to grow some grains, but I might need a year fighting weeds and mulching first. Quinoa or amaranth might be a good pseudo grain to grow to produce some carbs and be a fast growing spring crop. Sweetcorn could be another option, or a corn (maise) for flour, although in this climate it's always a risk unless I could get a variety a bit more adapted to here that I could get to ripen easily.
Do you think the mulch will work? What other materials could I use in the bigger areas.
What would you plant as some staples?
We use straw as mulch in our garden every year to keep weeds down and add organic matter to the soil. I'll offer you some of my thoughts on the matter since you asked. It takes a lot more mulch than you think in order to completely keep the weeds at bay. Just judging from your picture, I would guess that it needs to be two or three times thicker in order to do an effective job if I were starting off in the spring. Since you've already had frosts, it might be okay though I suspect by spring, the grass will poke up through it fairly thickly. We generally mulch in late May here as our garden crops gets tall enough (to allow the mulch to be applied thick enough) and when I tilled my garden here in the last week of October, it had already broken down enough to till up fairly nicely. So as mulch, it is fairly temporary in effectiveness. If I want a longer term solution, I always use shredded up tree mulch. It doesn't have to be nearly as thick to be effective and lasts a lot longer. I use it around all the fruit trees that I plant and generally will get a number of years out of it before I have to add more.
ReplyDeleteTo effectively kill the weeds but not be a burden later on, I might try laying out a layer of cardboard over the grass and wetting it down to hold it in place. I've heard it is fairly effective. I've never done a short term think like what you are thinking but for a longer term weed solution, my favorite is to buy a water permeable weed barrier fabric to lay down first and then a thin layer of mulch on top of that. It is fairly economical to purchase and does a really good job that will last for a number of years. It is also easy to cut holes in and plant squash in upcoming years. The biggest drawback though is that it doesn't compost and you really have to pull the entire mess up or permanently leave it down if you want to do something else there in the future like sow a grain. I've pulled enough of it up over the years to know it isn't a fun job getting it up and disposing of it.
One more thought on straw before closing this reply. Around here anyway, I have to be very judicious in which straw I obtain, or how it was prepared. Not all straw is created equal. We bought some straw that had lots of seeds baled up inside it and so every time it rained, all summer long, we got a nice crop of wheat growing between the rows of our vegetable garden. I've since switched to buying my straw from a farmer who raises rye seed which needs to be fairly pure when selling and there is a LOT less seeds in it. A good way to check is to drop a bale hard on some concrete, move it and inspect what fell out of the bale. If there is a lot of seed that fell out, steer clear of it. One last thing, I find straw will store fairly well overwinter and even through a summer by just putting it up off the ground on a pallet or something with a tarp over it. The mice will get into it and eat all the strings but it is still in good shape to spread the following year. We currently have next year's supply tarped near our garden.
Good luck!
P.S. I like both of your ideas of planting squash or grain in-between your fruit trees.
What an amazing reply! Yeah I ws thinking the straw wouldn't be enough and will need to be topped up. I have lots of plastic here I could cover it with in a month or so when the rain has got to it a bit more.
DeleteI'm going to have a lot of wood chip fairly soon, so I could use that as a cover, and rake it off before I start planting. It will rob nitrogen if dug in, but should be okay as a cover on top.
I've kept bales on pallets before with sheets on it, but hate giving the mice somewhere else to go, we got another cat this week so hopefully that'll help.
Cardboard fridge boxes, builders plastic tarpaulins, leaves...
ReplyDeleteYeah I think the cardboard will be a good option. I've got a lot of wood to hip as well so that will be good I think.
DeleteI live in the U.S in Oklahoma so I don't know if it's easily available in your area, but I've grown what is typically described as Indian Corn that is usually a short season variety of corn (70-80 day corn?).
ReplyDeleteThe variety I've grown is a generic type that I started growing over 10 years ago that would be similar to the Painted Mountain Corn variety. Since it's open-pollinated it produces different colors, maturities, etc. that you can play around with to possibly produce a locally-adapted variety.
That sounds like it would work. I'll try and find something similar. I thiink there's only so much sweetcorn we could use, but I'd love to try a flour type. Drying it here might be an issue though.
DeleteDo you think I should look for a painted mountain corn online?
If you can find a UK source for painted mountain corn it would be the type of corn I'm talking about, although I started with some ordinary ears of decorative corn that I thought would be interesting to try to grow.
DeleteAfter it actually grew the first year, I started sorting the different colors of kernels to plant in a block and found that I could plant blue kernels and get a mostly blue ear of corn, red kernels gave me red ears, etc. There should be enough genetic potential in an open-pollinated variety that you could select for the type of corn that you want if you are interested in that sort of thing.
It usually dries "in the field" here, if it's planted in early spring (April) it will be dried down and ready to harvest in late summer (August). If it's planted in May-June it will be ready in Sept. Of course, it is also usually over 90 degrees during the summer.