HOMESTEAD ADVICE
Be ready always to utilize and source local materials for your homestead. A lot of times, these can be had a really good prices and much cheaper than you will find at the stores. Check out your local Craigslist ads and your local printed paper for deals on compost, mulch, straw, hay, sawdust, rice hulls and anything else you can get for cheap. Straw like this will help TREMENDOUSLY to build up poor soil if that is what you are working with in your garden.
Last year I got a couple round bales of straw for the garden. It's great at protecting your soil from drying out and adds lots of nutrients to the ground for future gardens. Not to mention, mycelium fungus love straw and having mushrooms in your garden along with your plants means healthier plant roots.
But this year, the guy who was growing straw in my area didn't really have a good crop and had too many weeds in this straw as well. So I needed to find another source. You can find some amazing deals on Craigslist when it comes to stuff like this and so I kept my eyes peeled. Sure enough, I eventually found a posting of a warehouse full of new wheat straw about 2 hours away.
So I hopped in the truck and took the recently rebuilt trailer put together by @hansjurgen and set off to get some straw that I could use in the garden as well as other things!
The warehouse was huge! They had other warehouses too of different materials. These big barns are actually owned by a Mennonite farmer who lives in my town but keeps part of his business up in Missouri where I had to drive to.
I pulled my truck up to prepare to get loaded. We had to wait about 20 minutes for one of the hired hands to bring around the loader.
This is the trailer that @hansjurgen rebuilt from an old 16 foot travel trailer. He put some recycled chicken barn boards on it along with some eye bolts and it was ready to go. He also put in wiring harness for the new trailer lights. Everything worked great for the trip.
We got the straw home and will be layering it over the garden in the next couple days. We are having a good bit of rain right now but hopefully when that lets up, we can finish this quickly.
So that is our straw for the year. I wish the warehouse was closer but sometimes getting good stuff like this means you are going to have to put forth a bit of extra effort.
We have been using Lasagna style gardening since we moved here and would not have it any other way. Our soil is very healthy and you can grow almost anything in it.
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Excellent! I've made a point to only shop locally in 2018 and that means a lot of locally sourced materials. Many sheeple think I'm taking it to a bit of an extreme but it's very important to me. Good to see y'all doing the same!
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Yeah and it will help to develop good working relatioships with locals.
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How often do you put mulch/straw on your garden? How deep? and how big is your garden area. Was the straw starting to turn or just surplus they wanted to get ride of? Toby
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This is brand new straw that they are selling. I put it down as thick as possible. I forgot how big our garden is. I will do a post on that soon.
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You say "almost anything", what can't you grow well in your soil?
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Onions for some reason always give me trouble. Ive never had good results. Will keep trying.
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Do you have another area dedicated to just onions then? Did you do anything special, soil wise, to that area?
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Woohoo!!! What a deal! We've been watching Craigslist for the gardening stuff too and will probably have to take a trip to get wheat straw and rabbit droppings in a bit. We still have too many weeks of winter to be putting everything into the garden, but it is definitely fruit tree pruning time: we're having a 60 degree heat wave today ahead of refreezing next week.
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I got rabbit manure last year and I'm going to pass this year and see how it goes. Seriously there is no better manure than rabbit.
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very good idea @mericanhomestead
I think people do not think about things that are very useful to make the soil fertile, to grow mushrooms and useful for others
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Great Informative Post! That's A Lot Of Straw!
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A good post I read it completely I'll tell you my friend that it's just super
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Wow a big warehouse with lots of haystacks. work spirit @mericanhomestead
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Now that is a blessing! How awesome to have it close enough to get!
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that's a nice trailer! We get straw from a local dairy farm and it's made the world of difference with how our gardens perform over the summer (suppressing weeds and keeping moisture in the ground) The only issue we have is that it give slugs a place to hide so I have to stick beer traps around the garden to catch them.
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A friend of mine gets pine needles and I've heard those help with slugs.
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Interesting, thank you. I have access to unlimited pine around here so I will have to read up on that. I'll try anything organic. I've become quite skilled at murdering slugs in the night. It's not my favourite occupation but they can do an insane amount of damage overnight.
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This is the last straw! And this one... and this one... haha.
Hey Zach I know hay is used to feed animals, same as straw, but is hay also used to layer gardens? Which would be better hay or straw? Have you had a chance to compare?
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Jumping in here.. I hope you don’t mind. We’ve done both hay and straw and we find that hay, if not old and rotting, tends to spill a lot of seeds into the garden and we end up growing hay. If you want to use hay... if you can, unroll a bale and let the chickens scratch i it for a long time before covering the garden with it and they’ll eat the seeds for you. Straw... the only issue we have is making sure it hasn’t been sprayed with chemicals before putting it on the garden.
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You can put down hay but it needs to be really thick so when the seed sprouts it either can't root or break through what is above it. @shalomacres does this and has had pretty good results.
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Let's get "Back to Eden"!
;-)
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Did you ever try wood chips? We did them for four seasons before we decided it wasn’t a good idea for us. The wood seemed to be bringing in more bad bugs. Straw and hay have been a better idea. They’re much, much less difficult to use labor wise, and we don’t find the bad bug invasions as much. In fact, the grasses seem to encourage more spiders.
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Wood chips are carbon and straw and hay are nitrogen. Both are excellent for layering on your garden. And you are totally correct, the hay/straw is less labor and that is a bonus.
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I was never much of a fan of straw. It's not common around here. The few times I have used it (given to me free) it did not keep the weeds down even though I put it down thick (4" packed+). Also when it got wet it was really dangerous to walk on, VERY slippery. It was not as easy to handle as hay, which is my preferred mulch.
But, hey, if it works...
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We have just started using the lasagne method of gardening. So far so good! We have to travel great distances too in order to find quality goods. But it is worth it in the long run.
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