What you shared was also my experience, however, just a couple points: the more consecutive seasons you mulch the less weed pressure you will have in general. Second, you really have to be careful to get unsprayed organic straw. Many people are running into residual herbicides that will kill most of your annual garden. Also, as the straw breaks down it will not add as much nutrition to the soil as leaves or remial woodchips (the entire tree shredded, leaves/needles bark and wood). If you have anything germinate in your straw you may gain nitrogen by simply turning it over to disturb the small seedlings. Mostly it's wise to alternate mulches from year to year for the sake of the plant's nutritional needs. Thanks for your insight.
I’ve used wheat straw and it is great like you say. This is the most comprehensive upload on mulch that I’ve seen in a dozen years. Thank you for caring so much about your gardening craft and followers.
I have to say , my sheep only eat leaves off the alfalfa hay i give them. I found myself with all this left over straw. So i started using it as mulch in the garden beds and around the tree's. Everything is thriving! Bonus is the mixed in sheep poop in the straw 😂❤. Happy gardening. Great video
I have used both... The one time I used straw mulch, I chopped it up really fine and put a thin layer over freshly seeded pots. Within days these huge tree pots were filled with wheat sprouts. I think the key is to add a very thick layer of mulch. Also, how the wheat was harvested plays a huge role in the amount of wheat seeds in the mulch.
Straw mulch will encourage a bacteria dominated microbiome whereas hardwood chips will encourage a fungal dominated microbiome. Plants have an evolutionary succession of going from bacteria dominated soils to fungal dominated soils (ie grasslands to forests). So depending on what type of plants you want to grow, you should encourage the appropriate soil microbiome for the desired plants. Your fig trees are "woody" plants that would prefer the fungal end of the spectrum whereas your bananas are more "grass like" and prefer the bacteria end of the spectrum.
You would think that, but the straw actually gets stuck together in a fungal web as well. I have used both around my figs, and they love both. I haven’t seen a difference in vigor. I think that matters most is just having a mulch layer, in general. When vegetable gardening, I think the trouble with hardwood mulch is it makes it difficult to direct seed.
Wheat straw around here costs 5 or six bucks a bale if you can find it. I have used grass clippings mixed with leaves for years with excellent results and since they come free from my yard, this figures into the total cost of growing my food. One issue is that the leaves fall in the fall and the grass is collected in the summer therefore I have to save the leaves until the clippings are available.
I`m in Wilmington NC 5 yrs now MG so you now have me as a subscriber to learn about my new growing zone. Hard clay soil being converted to rich healthy living soil with lots of amenities... full all day long scorching summer sun along with trial and error. Added to raised garden beds 4x8 last month so we`ll see how things grow. Looking forward to your videos!
I didn't read all the comments so this may have been mentioned already. I've used straw for many years now with great results. I think straw and hay get confused because hay is totally full of weed seeds whereas straw is not. I have gotten a few grassy strands here and there which are easy to pull out. Great content as usual🙂
Thank you! The difference between straw and hay is that hay is a product, and straw is a byproduct. With hay, you're getting all the seed tops, since that's the product that's sold. Straw is nothing more than the "bottoms" of cereal grains - oats, barely, wheat, etc. - after the seeds have already been harvested. Straw will still contain some seeds, but the overwhelming majority of seeds will be gone since that's what you eat when you eat grains. We had a *very* warm December, so I'm seeing *some* seed germination from my fresh straw. However, it's not much. By simply taking a hand rake, you can get rid of them all in about 30 seconds.
How does this not cause a nightmare for weeding in your garden?? my yard is also a bunch of random weeds, clovers, dandelions, those purple cluster flowers, wild garlic grass, ect.. wouldn’t you want to avoid putting those in your garden?
@@brandypruitt4467 only if theyre flowering and have flowers mature enough to have viable seed , all those seeds can blow in on the wind anyways so i dont pay much attention to it and as he mentioned in the video it compacts down and prevents germination
I covered my lawn with forest leaves and then heaps and heaps of freshly cut straw ( it was really long grass from the local area cut amd dropped, and collected by me.) After a few months of doing nothing, I have four inches of the most incredible compost on top of my super sandy soil. I actually cannot believe how well this has worked. I also heavily mulched all the other areas of my garden. I had some butternut seedlings in the ground for a long time and they weren't doing anything. I was going to rip them up, but the mulch kicked them into gear and they started growing !
I’m a new gardener. Got my raised beds set up. Filled using hugelkultur method, topped with a mix of topsoil/compost… and thought I was done. So thankful I know now to cover my beds over the winter! Thank you!
Great vid. Nice to see young people taking up the hoe. This veteran gardener agrees: mulch is key, but be careful with pure wood mulches. They support very limited soil biology, most of it being fungus (while annual veggies require a bacterially-dominated spoil). Worse, slugs and flea beetles love it. I learned this the hard way, losing many crops to it in the early '90s. These days, I use uncured compost as a mulch on no-dig vegetable beds. Moving the compost from the pile to the beds frees up space so I can begin another compost pile, and spreading rough compost thin aerates it and exposes it to worms, speeding up the curing process and removing toxic chemicals. Also, the best much for trees is a living ground cover. I have strawberries under my dwarf trees, even the fruit trees, and wild ginger or Pennsylvania sedge under the larger oaks and maples.
Great video. I agree that mulch is a critical part of gardening success. Your bold statement is accurate. The benefits of composting and amending soil are reduced without protecting the soil with mulch. I vary mulch by location in the garden, but everything has a great organic cover.
@@TheMillennialGardener Like you, straw is my favorite mulch in the veggie garden. I use dried grass clippings as a light mulch when I direct seed and then add straw when the plants are bigger. Because I get a lot of wind, I often mix the straw with crushed leaves and it tends to stay in place better.
@@GardenerScott I wish I could use grass clippings. One of the few things I miss about living up north is the lawns. Fescue and Kentucky Blue makes some good mulch. Our lawns here on the NC coast are centipede grass, which is technically a weed with a wicked rhizome. When you cut the lawn, it's 50% seed tops. It's brutal 😅 We don't have much in the way of deciduous trees, either. We just have boring old pine needles. Better than nothing, though!
Your videos are great I am a beginner so every tip you give has been so useful. I use fabric grow bags of various sizes and your tips in this type of growing has been invaluable. I now use mulch in all my veg herbs and plants.
What’s your favorite mulch to use in your garden and around your trees? Let us know in the comments below! TIMESTAMPS for convenience: 0:00 Why Mulch Is The Best Tool For Organic Gardening 0:50 Mulch Varieties: Best And Worst Kinds Of Mulch 1:59 The Benefits Of Mulch For Your Garden 4:00 The Natural Mulch I Usually Use In My Garden 5:07 How I Use Hardwood Bark Mulch Around A Fruit Tree 5:34 Problem With Bark & Wood Chip Mulch In A Vegetable Garden 7:08 The Best Mulch For The Garden I've Found 9:05 Wheat Straw VS Hardwood Mulch Weed Suppression 13:39 Wheat Straw VS Hardwood Mulch Moisture Retention 16:59 Myths About Using Wheat Straw As Mulch 18:31 Using Wheat Straw In A Vegetable Garden 20:03 Final Thoughts On The Best Mulch For Gardening 20:50 Adventures With Dale
I use whatever is available, and honestly as long as the mulch is a few inches thick with at least the top 1" being composed of something that inherently contains many small air spaces with thin walls and minimally-connected surface area (straw, a mix of small twigs +/- leaves +/- scythed grass and/or weeds or hay) you get the absolute best results. FYI, you want to put solid mulch underneath hollow mulch, not the other way around. The reason for that is that having a top layer of hollow mulch acts like a thatch roof in almost every respect: it has extremely high insulation value because of the many small and non-continuous air spaces with minimal solid-to-air ratios and thus the heat in the top layer of exposed stems is vented within that same layer and is minimally transferred to lower layers thanks to the minimal surface contact between individual stems. The only difference between the mulch and the roof is that the horizontal angle, open ends on both sides, and loose packing of the mulch allows for free vertical movement of rain and other sources of condensed water vapor that contact the mulch, such as fog or dew drops. The main differencesbetween the cooling effect provided by sun- and surface- exposed solid vs hollow mulches that are in direct contact with the soil are: 1) Solid mulches will always capture and retain more environmental water within themselves than hollow mulches, because they have more continuous mass and similar or greater moisture-retaining qualities compared to hollow dry mulches, which is not a big deal during heavy rains but can be pretty significant if you are only getting like .1 inches at a time with several hours or days of sunlight and/or wind between such events , because a significant portion of such small volume precipitation will never reach the deeper layers of mulch or the soil beneath, and will instead be lost to evaporation before they can benefit the plants. Dew only happens twice per day, morning and evening, and the water volume delivered per square inch is very small, so it automatically counts as a low-volume precipitation event. 2) Solid mulches have more direct contact with the soil, and thus wick more moisture from the contact layer. The fewer and larger airspaces between such mulches allow for greater airflow within and between the mulch layers, which will always result in greater losses to evaporation. This is especially wood mulch of any type, as bark mulches tend to contain hydrophobic resins (especially conifer barks) that are slow to degrade and will not wick as much moisture as wood. The advantage of having lignified mulches like wood in direct soil contact is that you are providing a nutrient substrate that promotes a more "balanced" microbiome in terms of bacteria vs fungi vs protozoa. If you simply place a top layer of hollow mulch on top of this then you can get the best of both worlds, so to speak. This is both cheap and remarkably effective, because every new year's layer of wood/bark (solid layer) will compress the previous straw (hollow) layer, thus promoting its breakdown by increasing the decomposing straw's contact area with soil and increasing nutrient availability for the new feeder roots that aleays invade newly-forming humus. At the same time, the new straw layer on top of the new wood/bark layer minimizes temperature variations and moisture loss, while maintaining aeration and minimizing evaporative losses. This works every bit as well as it sounds, and I don't think that's too surprising... it's just a more efficient application of known material properties and the physics underlying said properties compared to a solid top layer with a hollow bottom layer.
Annual rye cover crop for winter. Then it dies in SC heat and becomes mulch. Turned my sand into soil after one season. Tied with chipped hardwood tree leaves chopped fine.
I like cover crops in garden, I do like hardwood mulch for trees except in times of heavy rain, which living on the gulf Coast happens a lot. I've had trees die from root rot.
I used last year's wheat straw to mulch my new raised strawberry beds, and it IS great at holding moisture, the only problem is that I have bunches of wheat sprouting everywhere.
I have used wheat straw as a mulch for over wintering my grapes in zone 3. I do get a lot of volunteer wheat plants growing the next year but they are easy to pull out my
Discovered this older video today. I am in upper NW VA, zone 6b. I went with straw on all my foot paths in the garden this year. I use a fine pine mulch in my raised beds as it breaks down faster and has led to a better soil composition over the years. At the end of the season I cover those beds with a thick layer of straw which is easily removed in the spring. The added benefit to straw over wood chips on my foot paths is that it makes kneeling for work in the beds much easier on my knees. Kneeling on the chips might as well have been gravel.
I have used chopped organic wheat straw, it occasionally has a couple of seeds, but not a big deal. I piled it high trying to hill potatoes, which turned out to be not very effective (super healthy plants, but not a lot of tubers) but the amazing thing was for next year I now have a completely broken down pile of dirt. I'm in zone 5b, excited to grow in the much improved soil in the spring. My fall lettuce loved it too.
Straw is excellent as mulch, but as you said, the key is to apply it constantly. Every 6-12 months, placing a thick layer will provide best results. It takes years to build good soil, but in time, you'll have better and better results. Soil is like wine and cheese - it gets better with age when you do it right!
i put a 6 to7 inch layer on all my32 inch walkways with exposed 12 inch wide beds dusted with crumbled straw bits as bed covering only water during germination and the hottest times and I am in inland CA.. love straw as insulator carbon supplement and worms galore! easy on the feet
Straw is the base of the grain left over after the seeds have been harvested, so it is much lower in seed content. It will, however, still contain seeds. It's a good idea to buy your straw bales 2 months ahead of when you'll use them so you can stack them and let them get beaten up by the rain and sun to kill all the seeds and wash off/burn off any residual herbicide/pesticide than may exist.
I plan to mulch my new raised strawberry bed with wheat or oat straw, not sure which it is but is certainly stalky like wheat. Have several bales left from last year I never used. So today after watching a video about cutting up the straw finer, I bought a Worx WG 509 blower / vacuum mulcher just today to chop the straw into finer mulch. Hope it works as well for me.
I'm glad you're able to get it in the desert! It's even sometimes tough to find here on the rainy coast. I imagine the stuff is practically free in the Midwest. It's *awesome* stuff.
I didn't realize you live in SE N.C. where I do, so this is going to really help me. I had to move from my last place and left my banana tree in the first year. Ordering another in about a week. You can get free mulch at some of the landfills also.
I love the long format videos and the second channel for digest pieces, new sub here, just picked up gardening (have a head start w parents) three weeks ago and I’m going hard bro. Thank you so much for the helpful info, love from Baja
Atwoods in Oklahoma, 'square straw bale', $9.99. Probably still cheaper than bags of hardwood. I may try it this next spring, but I'll probably still supplement with alfalfa pellets as a fertilizer. Trying to fix the soil organically as well as moisture retention. Also, we all hear different rumors in gardening, but the one I heard is not to use 'hay' bales because there is a ton of seed in them and to make sure what you are purchasing is 'straw' bales, so maybe that's why you didn't get a bunch of seeds. If you are still having trouble with the prickly vine from the neighbors (almost a year later), something I have had luck with is Tordon RTU. Don't spray it on. It's pretty potent and you don't want it getting picked up by the wind. Instead, pour a tiny amount into a small container and use a thin paint brush to paint it on the leaves. I did that this year on a flowering quince that has been coming up underneath my cholla and killing it. I cut the quince down to 3 or 4 inches and delicately (VERY delicately) painted the stubs and so far it hasn't come back and the cholla is looking better.
I use wheat straw as mulch as well, but to be fair to the woodchips, you had a really thick layer of straw on your banana beds. If you had the same amount of woodchips as you did straw, they would perform just as well at weed suppression as the straw did.
I put wheat straw on my raised beds last winter. I did have a lot of wheat growing it has been very easy to pull. I was at a conference and presenter suggested aging the bales a year before using so the seeds will die. I am going to try that.
Pretty good video man really enjoyed it. I do believe the bananas being taller and shading the wheat straw more so maybe caused it not to break down as much? Or for weeds to germinate?? . The Mulch was definitely exposed a lot more.
It's entirely possible - even likely - that the mulch being exposed in those cages for 4 months getting constantly hit by rain, sun, and freezing nights, totally destroyed 100% of the wheat seed. It's pretty common to order in compost and let the pile sit and age before spreading to ensure it's fully composted, so why not do that with straw? Buy the bales of straw early, let them sit out for 3-4 months in the rain and sun to degrade, then spread them. That's a way to ensure they won't contain viable seed and any herbicide leftover is inert.
That sounds a little labor intensive, no? Have you ever considered dumping the straw and running a lawnmower over it with a bag on, then dumping the bag? I just did that with some old sweet potato vines, and it did a good job.
Your clear explanation and full coverage of your topic was excellent! Then you even reviewed everything. Great job! I appreciate a talk that is clear and understandable without unnecessary repetition and words like “um”. I’m subscribing. 🙂
Agreed! A good technique for making a bed for tomatoes or anything; double dig a trench, lay six inches of straw in the bottom. It will squash with the weight of soil on top. Before filling in, pee on the straw and rhe nitrogen in it will start to break it down. It will act like a sponge to hold water and nutrients for the roots .
@@cjboac9864 Yes, it might seem an offensive way if getting nitrogen but it's available! Forever! I've heard that the so refined in the art of living Japanese use #2 and grow very healthy plants.
Good content. I use wood chip for pathways between beds. I used sugar cane mulch in the past but stopped due to the chemical fertilisers and pesticides used by commercial farmers. I now cut my own Rhodes grass. Grass clippings and leaves. I am now purposely growing legume shrubs to go in the mix. I pile it for a few weeks then use it as mulch. When I use wood chip I put cardboard down first. I use cardboard around all my trees now. I cover it with some compost and grasses, as that diminishes I top up with woodchip. Long winded but I'm not buying mulches so it gives me time. BTW I noticed your figs. Not many leaves. I recently got a fig. The leaves on my fig vanish almost as soon as they grow. They curled. Had rust and got eaten. The fig kept growing though, producing fruit. End of Winter here now ( zone 10 ) so temps down to single figure Celsius. No Fruit, but producing new leaves.
That’s what I’ve always used, but if you’re paying for it and you have an option, I really feel the straw is better. Hardwood often costs more if you’re paying for it.
I have what’s called a grab and go bag of straw I got for my chickens and mulched my fall veg garden. I didn’t realize it was full of wheat seeds till it seeded like crazy. I’m curious to see what happens in the spring. I’ve been picking the grass for the chickens in the mean time. Otherwise I love it. It seems to allow great cover that has air in it, it’s so light with lots of life going on on top of the soil.
Throw your straw in with your chickens as they will clean all of the seed out for you. After a couple of weeks it is manured and ready to put on your garden.
My advantage and success is probably because the straw sits in those banana cages for 4 months and decomposes, getting blasted by rain, sun and freezing temps, before spreading. By the time I spread the straw in March or April, any leftover seed is long rotted. It is probably good practice to buy your straw bales and let them sit out in the elements for a few months to begin breaking down and ensure not just the seed is destroyed, but any trace herbicide has gone inert.
excellent video, have bookmarked it for future reference. one note tho, at 3:27 I believe you mispoke. UV rays do not cause the evaporation, rather it's Infrared rays which agitate and 'heat' the water molecules, changing them to vapor. : )
Wheat straw can be expensive in many areas. There is also growing concern regarding persistent herbicides used in many grain crops to prevent weeds. These herbicides can destroy a vegetable garden. I live in the northeast and feel that shredded leaves and grass clippings as economical and safe mulch material.
Very timely video for me...I'm using straw mulch for the first time on my winter garden. Thanks for the knowledge!🙂 I'm glad you and Dale had a sweet Thanksgiving Day.🙂
I'm glad to hear it was timely. Every day with Dale is a great day. We had good weather and he was in his element harassing everyone in the house for food. There is a *reason why* HOUND has become a verb!
Straw is the stalk after the grain (seed head) is harvested so it there are very few seeds. Hay is made up of whole plants & if not harvested before seeds develop, can contain many seeds.
Precisely. Straw is a byproduct of the wheat harvest, so in theory, the seeds should be mostly removed. Allowing the straw bales to sit out in the weather for 3-6 months to begin decay can also be beneficial. That's what I sort of did by using them to insulate my bananas for 5 months prior to use. The result: ZERO weeds.
If done lightly for seedlings to pop but still need shaded soils and wind protection straw will send up tons of volunteers. Key is so what wheat is great grass with loads of benefits. Green fert or actually harvesting. The wheat. Bud I plan on doing a heavy layer to stop all unwanted growth after seedling develop
In college, I took horticulture classes and we did a huge landscaping project as part of our class. We brought in dump trucks of double hammered hardwood mulch and we planted everything from trees, shrubs, perennials and annuals in 18" of nothing but that. Wheat straw is hard to get in Texas. And what I did get at Tractor Supply in compressed bales killed everything like it burned them. Contacted Tractor Supply and was informed it had herbicide residue still in. Being in compressed bales with plastic wrap, it compounded the problem.
That sounds extremely unusual. If you purchase straw bales, you can purchase them 3-6 months ahead of time and let them sit out in the rain and sun. That'll mitigate any potential problems. Treat straw just like you would treat compost - let it sit out and age for awhile before spreading.
Great video. What a cool straw/banana trick - that's awesome! Never heard the term Weed Penetration before, but my inner child kept laughing every time you said it. I need to grow up. FYI - I also have a small car...found out my local wood/mulch place delivers (great for a big load), but they also allow you to drive your car in and fill up yourself. You just put your car on a scale before and after. I bought some 10 gallon fabric pots with handles that work very well to transport, but others use rubbermaid bins, trash bags, buckets, etc. They even offer a free day once a month where everyone with small cars show up to help themselves!
I’ve used straw mulch in all of my containers this season. In about half of those, huge clumps of grass is growing. When I emptied the pots to recycle it into my compost, I observed the root system of those grasses. They were taking over the pots with long, thick, and numerous roots. My solution is cover cropping and termination to grow your own mulch. Peas/legumes are the preference. Don’t let them flower. Cut them down in warmer climates or let frigid winter conditions due it for you.
Slimy, wet, decaying wheat straw, or any kind of straw, can become a super magnet for SLUGS. I tried growing potatoes in hay, and slugs ate them all up.
I think you should thin your banana plants & water them more. (A lot more.) Maybe to three or four mother-baby pairs. Or two grandma-mom-baby trios. (I prefer trios as insurance to storms & frosts). Also, they look lonely. Plant some taros, ginger & chili peppers there, too. Trust me, they are friends & need the same humid environment. A papaya near the edge (more sunlight) will do great, too. It won’t tolerate wet feet as much as taro. Think humid tropical jungle- their original home. Fun tips: 1. You can culture some edible mushrooms under there for fun. 2. Tabasco pepper plants will not bear much fruits there but you can harvest the leaves. Cook “tinola”. Best with green papayas. 3. Use the banana leaves as wrappers when steaming & roasting food. 4. After harvesting, chop down the banana plant & use it as mulch. Same with the peels. Earthworms love it! That will give the daughter banana plant more space & nutrients to grow. 5. Make that banana patch a turbo-compost place. Tuck your kitchen wastes, egg shells & cartons, etc under the mulch. Let volunteer chili peppers grow. 6. Banana & taro are very thirsty plants. Fortunately, they like gray water. Put your washing station beside them-washing produce, garden implements, or outdoor shower. 7. Banana blossoms are edible. 8. Practice permaculture.
Just a note on wheat straw. Check with the farmer who grew it if u can. A lot of wheat is sprayed with roundup to kill the wheat the last week in the field so the wheat dries down evenly. It's called enhanced harvest. It may not hurt your plants initially but it harms the soil life.
The straw gets trucked in from various suppliers at most retailers, so you're going to get different straw from different locations at different times. Unless you're buying direct, it would be difficult if not impossible to tell. I think the fear of herbicides is vastly overstated, because in order for herbicides to be effective, the concentration has to be high enough to be toxic. The chances of wheat straw having so much herbicide on it that's still active and hasn't degraded yet that it could actually harm your soil is slim, and if you're truly concerned, simply let it sit out in the rain and sun for 3-6 months. It'll be fully washed away and inert by then. It's pretty common to not use compost immediately and let it age first, so this isn't unreasonable. I know the straw isn't harming anything, because when you pull it up, the soil underneath is lovely. Let it sit out for awhile before use, and the problem should be solved.
Pine needles are bailed here like square bails of hay and sold at hardware and gardening stores. Long needle pine is used and farmed just for this. We use cardboard covered with pine needles and that lasts one year to be composted the next year. They do not make the soil more acidic. The yellow long needle pine tree so common in Georgia has a new use! We have raked up some from the yard and put them around blue berries, figs, tomatoes, egg plants, peppers, any single stem plant. We do water more so the water gets past the mulch to the soil and soaks down to the roots. Once watered then, this works best for us so far.
After using every thing from grass clippings to seaweed eel grass, my go to mulch for veggies and annuals is pine needles. Never a shortage of curbside piles around my NE NJ neighborhood and all for free. Excellent weed suppression, water retention, very slow to decay, permeability in both directions, and due to the barbed nature of the needle, extreme wind resistance. Hardwood mulch is better at promoting an anaerobic environment/fungal microbiome best suited for deciduous plants and trees whilst softer less compacting mulches promote aerobic conditions better suited for veggies and other annuals particularly under wetter conditions. Wheat straw would be my second choice but, it's not free for the taking at my location.
I’m handicapped and have an electric scooter, I just got baby chicks so I use a large Christmas tree bag in my mini van to haul bales of hay. Their nice the feed store puts them in the bag for me and since they hold a large artificial Christmas tree, you can zip it completely open to place the bale on then zip it up, it has heavy duty straps for carrying.A strap on each end for pulling as I drive my scooter around back, plus their waterproof even though I put it in a lg tube with wheels, makes it easier to roll in and out of my pen. No mess in van or smell of hay. Also can haul bags of feed. I also carry an extra bag in the van. Got them after Christmas from Amazon they were 2 to a package.
I went today to purchase this Harwood Bark... I guess they don't have it anymore, so I purchased the DECO BARL MEDIUM NUGGETS, they look all natural, no paint or anything. I hope I did a good purchase.
Living in Australia, we have the opportunity to use sugarcane mulch. This tends not to harbour seeds. And the problem I have found with woodchip mulch, which I love for flower beds, is that it can encourage white ants, which are quite prevalent in certain areas. But sugarcane mulch is excellent for all veggie beds.
As far as seeing grass sprouting in the straw, its mostly just whatever grain the straw came from. It pulls easy and I just lay it back down as green manure..
Yep, that's true. For me, I never had to pull a single blade. I had zero germination. That being said, one of the biggest sources of "weeds" in my garden are volunteer tomato and pepper plants! It can get pretty annoying come July 😂
I've used straw in my raised beds since day 1. It's really good. I rarely water and hardly ever see a weed. If one does pop up, it pulls out, root and all, really easily.
I've used pine straw in the past. My main issue with pine straw is I'm not a huge fan of the look, and it constantly blows away. It is good stuff, though, in terms of function. If I had a truck, I'd probably go get myself a few trash bags full. I have been collecting the falling needless my rear property and spreading where I can. I've gotten myself about 20 free gallons so far and I've been dumping them under my citrus trees.
I don't think my straw is wheat straw and this year a bale is $15! But I've been using straw and wow when it finally breaks down in a mix of soil it's like the black gold people talk about.
I agree that mulch is the most important component on the soil. It protects the soil, keeps it moist, suppress weeds, it makes compost in between layer of the soil and mulch, saves time and effort in watering, composting, overthinking, its simply dumping all rotting materials on top.
I have grown tomatoes in strawbales for 3 years. I started because I was renting, but it has always works. And in then I would mow it in the spring. I noticed that the best soil was under the bales and rotated. Now I use the bales for insulation in winter and mulch in summer = great combo.
That sounds like a good plan. If you let a straw bale sit in a position for a couple months and then pick it up, you'll find a ton of bugs underneath, especially in the winter. They're keeping warm, and slowly chomping away, decomposing the bale and improving the soil underneath. They're really great!
You may get a couple seedlings here and there, but they pull easily. We had a warm December, so I did have a few sprouts. Just run your hand through the mulch layer for 3 seconds and they all come out.
That works great, as long as you don't have recent herbicide treatments on your lawn or your grass isn't full of seed tops. I can't use the grass clipping from my lawn, because it's a Southern grass - Centipede. The seed tops are nasty, and if I were to use it, I'd have rhizomous weeds everywhere.
I use a chaff marketed as feed for horses as bedding for my chickens. It is composed of chopped straw and alfalfa. After cleaning out the coop I put it in my compost bins but it would name a great mulch also 😅
I bought straw for my garden and was somewhat pleased with it.But it did not fair well in my strawberries and I have been inundated with weeds. It was great in my garlic bed I planted last fall. I’m not entirely convinced yet. But do think it is one of the better mulches.
An inch of rain in the last 30 days would be nice. Currently at maybe .2" in the last 2 months. Going to be a pretty dry winter here. I've never been that interested in straw for a mulch as I can't quite guarantee that it hasn't been hit with a broadleaf herbicide before harvest (same with some types of manure that might have residual amounts that can affect your plants). I don't use herbicides and would rather not be accidentally bringing them onto the property if I can easily avoid it. I think some annual vegetables that might be particularly sensitive are tomatoes or peppers. I'd be much more on board if there was a way to know where you were getting your straw from locally. Now... I could just get more of my "native" areas of the yard growing with warm season grasses. With the little bit I have already, I might get a decent amount by the end of the season as the grasses will readily get to 3' tall (which leaves a quite a bit of straw below the seed heads). I think there are some specific plants that don't appreciate the amount of moisture that wood chips hold (strawberries come to mind, I'm trying to get a patch established in the front yard). For cost, I get a 12-15 cubic yard truck load of arborist woodchips for about $90 (delivery charge from a specific arborist, no chipdrop here). I'm not sure bales of straw could ever compete with that. FWIW, my perception of seed germination suppression has mostly been on two things: new seeds that blow onto the ground can't physically get to the soil and the temperatures in mulch are a bit less than uncovered soil. Keeping the mulch thick has been pretty useful for me. If I want some seedlings to come up, I'll pull the mulch back and drop a handful of seeds in under the mulch. They might not germinate quickly due to lower temperatures, but I have decent success in the long run. I mostly do this for native plants that germination might be tricky anyway (long cold stratification period, etc).
It's relative. Drought here can be more damaging than drought your way in theory, because we have a fire risk orders of magnitudes higher than out West since every spare inch of the unpaved ground is covered in brush and debris. When things get dry here, our fire weather risk goes through the roof. We have so much vegetation here that the demand on our water table is absolutely enormous, so drought on the East Coast can compound rather rapidly. I'm not complaining - we already exceeded our annual rainfall back in September, here, and I'm enjoying the non-stop clear blue skies. It's a nice break, and I know the rain will return soon. That's the reason why I love "drought" on the East Coast - there is really no such thing, because they're all so short-term. The problem with drought out West is that it can last for years. If you are concerned about herbicides, simply stack the straw up, hose it down and let it sit in the sun for 3-6 months. Nothing will degrade chemicals faster than non-stop UV rays. I think it's a *really* overstated problem, and one of those "problems" that only exists because fears on the internet beat it to death. But, of course, if you can get another source of mulch for free or more easily locally that's cheaper and works just as well, there's no reason to go through the trouble. I've been trying to get arborist woodchips for years, and nobody will come out my way. I'm too far off the beaten path in a subdivision, and nobody wants to come in, even for $80. I've tried.
@@TheMillennialGardener Ugh, I would have thought with access to chipdrop, it'd be easier for you. I don't have it great (about a year waitlist before I get chips), but at least I can get them and plan around the timeframe. I have space on my property to let a giant pile of woodchips age. You're totally right that I could do the same thing with straw, let it sit and age. The sun out here is brutal. After a season the top wood chips are really bleached (two seasons they're approaching drift wood color). 7000' elevation means there's noticeably less air above me than sea level (11.3 psia versus 14.7). We get a bit of fire danger with the reduced moisture, but it's usually year round except when we have good precipitation (usually monsoon). Winter isn't usually this dry and the winds might make for some noticeable fire conditions (red flag + excess dryness). While we don't have dense forests (I think the correct term for where I live is open woodland), the systemic drought stress on some types of trees can make them really susceptible to pests such as pine borers. Then all it takes is a camper that doesn't drench a fire and we have a couple thousand acre blaze in a day or two. Drought sucks everywhere, but yeah, we might tolerate it a little better. The native scrub brush can survive on only a few inches of rain per year. The 400 year old one-seed junipers in my back yard are some of the most drought tolerant trees around here, but some of that is from their ridiculous root systems (200+' tap roots). Native warm season grasses don't need any supplemental water. Aren't native plants cool? :D
As usual good observations. Counter intuitive as they say. Clean centipede clippings and leaves for me. Fresh, semi composted, or fully composted. I think we like to look at the bare soil after we prepare it. Looks nice till it's rained on and baked.
Are you able to get clean centipede grass clippings? Mine goes to seed so quickly that I can't do it. Centipede doesn't like being mowed a lot, so I try to let it grow 2 inches before I cut it, but it always goes to seed. I'll tell you, don't move to the coastal South if you want a nice lawn 😂
Perhaps someone can correct me…but I tried straw as a mulch in my nicely manicured raised, weed free garden beds. Atheistically it looked nice, was keeping the moisture in the soil, a bale a straw was relatively cheap,…etc. Within one week, the seeds within the straw bales began germinating. I began seeing straw grass popping up through the straw mulch. Point is…if you don’t want to be weeding wheat straw in your garden you may want to consider a different mulching material.
When you buy fresh straw bales, it's a good idea to stack them up and let them sit in the sun and rain for 1-2 months before use. Let the straw get washed from rain and baked in the sun so any residual herbicides get washed off and burnt off by the sun and any seeds get destroyed.
Use good quality straw, it has fewer weedy seeds. If you use the cheap stuff, it's often full of weeds. Learned that from experience. Also, try using lucern-hay - it has more nutrients.
The problem is cost. Bale's of straw are $5-6 from a farm supply store, but those small bags of EZ Straw are $15. You'd go broke if you had more than a couple beds. Straw itself is fairly low in weeds since the grain portion has already been harvested, but a smart way to do this is to buy your straw 3-6 months ahead of time, stack your bales in the yard, and let the sun and rain hit them for months. That will begin the decomposition process and destroy seed. Then, spread the "old straw" around your plants later.
Wheat straw literally grew wheat all through my beds. It was a pain in the butt to pull out, and when I did, all of my compost came out with it. It made a huge mess that made us almost give up. I would never use wheat straw again in my zone 8a bed. It was full of wheat seeds, and they germinated like crazy as soon as it was exposed to rain and sunlight.
If you add lots of water to the straw bale and leave it for a year, most of the grain will germinate, the next year it will make a mulch with less wheat growing
I am really enjoying your videos really informative direct to the point not a lot of chitchat that means nothing. on your post video with the bananas versus the Figs those bananas consume a tremendous amount of water I use them in landscaping low lying areas that seem to hold water and they literally dry a place out so probably huge variable in the assessment
Thanks for the info! I would love to use wheat straw for mulch. Do we need to worry if the straw was treated with any herbicides that could harm our plants? Or maybe keeping the hay bales out in the sun for a half year previous to using them, would take care of that worry.
Personally, I do not think so. Herbicides break down pretty quickly, and by the time you get the straw to your house, it's probably been a long time since the last time it was sprayed. If you're concerned, simply stack the bales and let them sit in the rain and sun for a few months like you said. Rain and sun will wash away and degrade any remaining herbicides, as well as destroy the weed seeds. From what I've seen, old straw is better than fresh straw. Since I use them to protect my bananas for 3-4 months before spreading it as mulch, that's probably the sweet spot.
You should do some research on aminopyralid contamination. You definitely need to be concerned about it and it does not break down in only a few months.
@@eileenbeiter4569 perspective is everything. These commercial farms abuse these chemicals for generations, and despite the most reckless abuse imaginable, they still grow enormous amounts of food and attract beneficials. Where are the case studies where a guy with an organic garden brings in a few bales of straw and the data shows it contaminating their ecosystem and kills beneficials? The answer is they don't exist. I'm all for being as organic as possible for a whole host of reasons, but I don't believe in seeking out fear. Literally everything we ingest has trace contamination. The very water we drink and water our gardens with comes out of dirty pipes full of trace contaminants. Life is very resilient, and I'm 100% positive that my soil is not being harmed by using conventional straw bales. I can prove that by simply digging 3 inches deep. Don't let "perfect" be the enemy of good.
I now have 23 small truckloads of hardwood and pine mixed chips in my backyard delivered over the summer months. But, like you, I've heard the same issues with wheat straw so I opted for the chips. 🙄 Oh well looks like the chips will have to fill the bill for a while.
If I could get that for free, I would take every pile. Unfortunately, when you have to pay for it, you have to choose. I was always afraid of straw, but now that I’ve seen it in action, I’m in love. If you’re scared, let the bales sit out in the rain all winter to rot, then use it. That should kill the seeds. Maybe that’s why I’m so lucky?
@@TheMillennialGardener Well it is "free". But after you tip the (? tree trimmers) hauling crew a 10 here and a 20 there it does add up. And good luck with even getting them started - It took me 5 or 6 years since they brought it last time. You have to run down the foreman of the crew wherever they are working and request it - and even a 20 spot there might pay off ... well it's a game with them to see who has the best "incentive" for them. 😉
@@gitatit4046 I've been offering $80 on Chipdrop for over 2 years, as well as called some local companies. I've yet to be successful 😥 Location has a lot to do with it. I think I'm too far out of the city and too far out of the way, and they really don't like going to subdivisions. For 10-20 yards of wood chips, I'd gladly offer $100! Mulch is $40 a yard. A 10-yard delivery is easily over $400. Even $100 would be a steal.
@@TheMillennialGardener That's right. I don't mind the tipping since I know I'm getting a bargain in the end. BUT the hassle and frustration of trying to get it delivered is a different matter. I guess we do what we gotta do in the long run. I wish you luck on your end.
@@TheMillennialGardener - I had the terrible experience with straw bale bought in Home Depot: it was all full of seeds. I almost killed my strawberries with germinated weeds... With EZ-Straw my experience is strictly positive. No seeds in it. I'm using free truck deliveries of wood chips as well. And free horse manure from the nearby stable. Horse manure could be dangerous, though, if they used hay with herbicides...
My experience with wheat straw was a nightmare, it filled my bed with endless sprouts from the seeds in the straw, then also you don't know what herbicides they used on it in the field. Not for me. I love your garden and banana trees. Thank you for sharing.
Are you sure you used straw and not hay? Straw is a byproduct, and it usually contains few seeds. You can easily prevent this, though, by buying your wheat straw 2 months before you use it. Buy your bales, stack them and let them sit in the sun and rain. That will destroy the seed, and it will degrade and wash off any residual pesticide that may have once be sprayed.
They sell that at Tractor Supply, but it's $16 a bag. It's a beautiful product, but it's the same size as the hardwood mulch bags at Lowe's for $3. If you have small beds, I'm sure it works well, but I'd go broke buying as much as I need. Unless you have a much cheaper source. A bale of straw is $5 and will have 4 times the coverage. The bales of straw will not be as nice, but you can always let the straw sit outside and rot for a few months if you want to make sure the seeds have decayed.
Wheat is also considered an Allelopathic plant, meaning that that the plant releases natural plant suppressant compounds that prevent other plant seeds from germinating near them; hence such plants as sunflowers and walnut trees that have these same effects on competing plants that try to grow near them. After time the wheat straw looses these weed suppressant properties as it decomposes over time. I find wheat straw a very good mulch!
There is no best mulch in my opinion. Different mulches for different purposes and different crops and different climates. For example here in the subtropics of Australia if you use straw too thick then it goes anarobic. Forms a layer that can also be hard for moisture to get through. Every mulch has a purpse except the artifical dyed ones. They all have different decompostition rates and different fungi and bacteria feed on different mediums. I use a multitude of differnt mulches and trial them to see how they go. Different textures in the garden is also very beautiful. Woodchip here, leaf mulch over there and some straw round the place as well . I enjoyed the video and information just sharing my experience.
Agreed, I like to use different materials, mixed together or just when I get something at a certain moment, I go with that. Straw should never be too thick and never walked over, that reasonably prevents it from becoming anaerobic, but never completely.
I generally agree with your premise. The "best" mulch is the mulch that you can get and afford. I really enjoy straw, but if somebody gave me a giant truckload of arborist woodchips, I'd take that every time over paying for straw. My point is, if you're paying for it, straw probably has the best balance of weed suppression and cost benefit. It's cheaper than the bark mulches, and it provides better weed suppression. If you live in a place where your neighbors put out bags of leaves this time of year and you can take them for free, that's even better. Anything free and natural is the way to go.
Tractor Supply sells a bail with 5 different hay. Alfalfa barley and I forget but it's killer bedcover It has not only micro and macro beneficials but its all soaked with Mollasis.
Great info, as usual, and timely. I was just researching mulch since I've had to move to another state (KY). I found some concern that wheat straw causes a mold problem due to moisture retention and the way it compacts. And what do you think about the idea that some mulches can change the soil PH?
Any mulch is going to cause some fungal growth, but it's generally beneficial. I have been stuffing my bananas for a couple seasons with straw, and I've never had a problem. I'm very impressed by it. I think mulches changing soil pH is largely overstated, since most things are fairly neutral. Wheat straw isn't going to affect pH much. Neither will pine straw. Pine bark may lower pH some, but you need to constantly reapply it to keep the effect going. Hardwood bark is mildly alkaline, but again, you need to constantly reply to keep the effect going. Most people afraid of soil pH issues work hard to get arborist woodchips since they're often a hugely diverse blend that "balances out." In short, most readily available mulches won't affect soil pH enough that most plants will not tolerate it.
@@TheMillennialGardener Pine straw??? Hooray! I got a yard full! Can I add the banana peels and egg shells to those? Thank you so much for this discussion!!!
Agree In all areas! Have found the same to be true, although I did get one batch of wheat straw that had some trace herbicides and my plants showed the signs, but, my soil biological was so good, they grew out of it pretty quickly. One note though regarding mulching your veg garden with the straw. It WILL DEFINITELY draw in the snails more. (At least in my area, anyway) Zone 8B, But I just know in advance and set out my baby food jars with cheap beer and they die happy! 🤔😄
Regarding the herbicide, it is probably good practice to buy the straw bales and let them sit for a few months before use. Letting them rot some will ensure the seed is dead and any trace herbicide is destroyed. I, thankfully, haven't had issues with snails (yet), but iron phosphate is quite effective and cheap.
@@TheMillennialGardener thank you for that. I have huge piles of sprayed horse hay that is used for running horses so it is really sprayed. It has been sitting for three years and has started to decompose. Do you think that would be safe for my garden?
Many people including myself use straw, it's an old old gardening technique thru the ages. Nowadays it's tough to find organic straw but it's worth it, otherwise you can ruin your garden with herbicides used on the grains (they even spray wheat to force it to ripen prior to harvest). Yes there's seeds in the straw (not as bad as hay) however they easily come out, much easier than weeds in bare soil! and you just lay them on top of the straw where they shrivel up and add a bit of nitrogen.
Aged Wood And leaf mulch is what I use. Be careful of the wheat hay, a good amount of is is sprayed with a chemical called grazon for weed control. Once sprayed with this chemical it will deter your garden plants if used as a mulch.
A simple way around that is to just let it sit out in the rain for a few months before using it. Those sprays have a pretty short half life, especially when exposed to full sun and rain. Letting it decompose will also kill off any active seeds.
Because of a lack of other biomass, I started using larger grass stalks and other stalks, bigger materials, and I'm impressed though it doesn't look that great.
I realize this video is a few months old and I'm just catching up. However, what about the resource you got the wheat straw from? As any supplement to your food when your trying to be natural as possible with no harsh chemicals...
I also use barley straw for my plants with the occasional barely that pops up..Quick question do you attract banana spiders? since you have been growing them.Great video very informative..
Thank you again for another great video! Are you finding that straw mulch is still your go to, even with the added issue of the recent added complexity of strong herbicides like Grazon & others being used in US grain fields? I found this when using store bought manure compost, it caused my plants to die & literally sterilized the areas of my soil for at least 2 years that I used it on. I'm hoping you're still having great success with wheat straw so that I can do that too! :)
What you shared was also my experience, however, just a couple points: the more consecutive seasons you mulch the less weed pressure you will have in general. Second, you really have to be careful to get unsprayed organic straw. Many people are running into residual herbicides that will kill most of your annual garden. Also, as the straw breaks down it will not add as much nutrition to the soil as leaves or remial woodchips (the entire tree shredded, leaves/needles bark and wood).
If you have anything germinate in your straw you may gain nitrogen by simply turning it over to disturb the small seedlings.
Mostly it's wise to alternate mulches from year to year for the sake of the plant's nutritional needs.
Thanks for your insight.
I’ve used wheat straw and it is great like you say. This is the most comprehensive upload on mulch that I’ve seen in a dozen years. Thank you for caring so much about your gardening craft and followers.
Thank you! I was getting nervous, because the video was getting pretty long. Sometimes, you don't realize how long you film 😆
I have to say , my sheep only eat leaves off the alfalfa hay i give them. I found myself with all this left over straw. So i started using it as mulch in the garden beds and around the tree's. Everything is thriving! Bonus is the mixed in sheep poop in the straw 😂❤. Happy gardening. Great video
I have used both... The one time I used straw mulch, I chopped it up really fine and put a thin layer over freshly seeded pots. Within days these huge tree pots were filled with wheat sprouts. I think the key is to add a very thick layer of mulch. Also, how the wheat was harvested plays a huge role in the amount of wheat seeds in the mulch.
Wheat will be like gold shortly there is a world shortage coming by winter, you might want to encourage it to grow !
Straw mulch will encourage a bacteria dominated microbiome whereas hardwood chips will encourage a fungal dominated microbiome. Plants have an evolutionary succession of going from bacteria dominated soils to fungal dominated soils (ie grasslands to forests). So depending on what type of plants you want to grow, you should encourage the appropriate soil microbiome for the desired plants. Your fig trees are "woody" plants that would prefer the fungal end of the spectrum whereas your bananas are more "grass like" and prefer the bacteria end of the spectrum.
You would think that, but the straw actually gets stuck together in a fungal web as well. I have used both around my figs, and they love both. I haven’t seen a difference in vigor. I think that matters most is just having a mulch layer, in general. When vegetable gardening, I think the trouble with hardwood mulch is it makes it difficult to direct seed.
@@TheMillennialGardener ❤
Wheat straw around here costs 5 or six bucks a bale if you can find it. I have used grass clippings mixed with leaves for years with excellent results and since they come free from my yard, this figures into the total cost of growing my food. One issue is that the leaves fall in the fall and the grass is collected in the summer therefore I have to save the leaves until the clippings are available.
Leaves also contain a lot of trace minerals being tree roots are so long and have a wide reach.
This year it’s $7.95-$9.95/bale. Huge price jump.
I`m in Wilmington NC 5 yrs now MG so you now have me as a subscriber to learn about my new growing zone. Hard clay soil being converted to rich healthy living soil with lots of amenities... full all day long scorching summer sun along with trial and error. Added to raised garden beds 4x8 last month so we`ll see how things grow. Looking forward to your videos!
I didn't read all the comments so this may have been mentioned already. I've used straw for many years now with great results. I think straw and hay get confused because hay is totally full of weed seeds whereas straw is not. I have gotten a few grassy strands here and there which are easy to pull out. Great content as usual🙂
Thank you! The difference between straw and hay is that hay is a product, and straw is a byproduct. With hay, you're getting all the seed tops, since that's the product that's sold. Straw is nothing more than the "bottoms" of cereal grains - oats, barely, wheat, etc. - after the seeds have already been harvested. Straw will still contain some seeds, but the overwhelming majority of seeds will be gone since that's what you eat when you eat grains. We had a *very* warm December, so I'm seeing *some* seed germination from my fresh straw. However, it's not much. By simply taking a hand rake, you can get rid of them all in about 30 seconds.
Think straw does better job protecting conserving and decays faster building soil
My “ lawn” is made of white clover, wild violets, weeds and grass. It makes the best mulch I have ever used!
Do you ever have a weed seed problem in your garden? I'm weighing my options and strongly considering using grass mulch
How does this not cause a nightmare for weeding in your garden?? my yard is also a bunch of random weeds, clovers, dandelions, those purple cluster flowers, wild garlic grass, ect.. wouldn’t you want to avoid putting those in your garden?
@@brandypruitt4467 only if theyre flowering and have flowers mature enough to have viable seed , all those seeds can blow in on the wind anyways so i dont pay much attention to it and as he mentioned in the video it compacts down and prevents germination
I covered my lawn with forest leaves and then heaps and heaps of freshly cut straw ( it was really long grass from the local area cut amd dropped, and collected by me.) After a few months of doing nothing, I have four inches of the most incredible compost on top of my super sandy soil. I actually cannot believe how well this has worked. I also heavily mulched all the other areas of my garden. I had some butternut seedlings in the ground for a long time and they weren't doing anything. I was going to rip them up, but the mulch kicked them into gear and they started growing !
Mulch is important. What I can afford and is available is our own grass clippings (never chemicals in our property).
Grass clippings work well and it’s free 👍
Do you put fresh clippings on your beds or dry them out first?
@@AutumnSeaveyHicks Mine are dried out first.
@@SimplyCanuckFarming Thanks so much!
That grass clipping will also add nitrogen too.
I’m a new gardener. Got my raised beds set up. Filled using hugelkultur method, topped with a mix of topsoil/compost… and thought I was done. So thankful I know now to cover my beds over the winter!
Thank you!
Great vid. Nice to see young people taking up the hoe. This veteran gardener agrees: mulch is key, but be careful with pure wood mulches. They support very limited soil biology, most of it being fungus (while annual veggies require a bacterially-dominated spoil). Worse, slugs and flea beetles love it. I learned this the hard way, losing many crops to it in the early '90s. These days, I use uncured compost as a mulch on no-dig vegetable beds. Moving the compost from the pile to the beds frees up space so I can begin another compost pile, and spreading rough compost thin aerates it and exposes it to worms, speeding up the curing process and removing toxic chemicals.
Also, the best much for trees is a living ground cover. I have strawberries under my dwarf trees, even the fruit trees, and wild ginger or Pennsylvania sedge under the larger oaks and maples.
Is the uncured compost not tying up the nitrogen in the soil?
@@y0nd3r probably is
We buy 6-8 straw bales for Halloween decor.. I keep them after the Holiday and use them in the spring time for my garden.
Great video. I agree that mulch is a critical part of gardening success. Your bold statement is accurate. The benefits of composting and amending soil are reduced without protecting the soil with mulch. I vary mulch by location in the garden, but everything has a great organic cover.
Thanks! What's your favorite mulch for your vegetable garden? It's always tough to deal with mulch in the garden when direct-seeding.
@@TheMillennialGardener Like you, straw is my favorite mulch in the veggie garden. I use dried grass clippings as a light mulch when I direct seed and then add straw when the plants are bigger. Because I get a lot of wind, I often mix the straw with crushed leaves and it tends to stay in place better.
@@GardenerScott I wish I could use grass clippings. One of the few things I miss about living up north is the lawns. Fescue and Kentucky Blue makes some good mulch. Our lawns here on the NC coast are centipede grass, which is technically a weed with a wicked rhizome. When you cut the lawn, it's 50% seed tops. It's brutal 😅 We don't have much in the way of deciduous trees, either. We just have boring old pine needles. Better than nothing, though!
Your videos are great I am a beginner so every tip you give has been so useful. I use fabric grow bags of various sizes and your tips in this type of growing has been invaluable. I now use mulch in all my veg herbs and plants.
Me too. I like grow bags and straw.
What’s your favorite mulch to use in your garden and around your trees? Let us know in the comments below! TIMESTAMPS for convenience:
0:00 Why Mulch Is The Best Tool For Organic Gardening
0:50 Mulch Varieties: Best And Worst Kinds Of Mulch
1:59 The Benefits Of Mulch For Your Garden
4:00 The Natural Mulch I Usually Use In My Garden
5:07 How I Use Hardwood Bark Mulch Around A Fruit Tree
5:34 Problem With Bark & Wood Chip Mulch In A Vegetable Garden
7:08 The Best Mulch For The Garden I've Found
9:05 Wheat Straw VS Hardwood Mulch Weed Suppression
13:39 Wheat Straw VS Hardwood Mulch Moisture Retention
16:59 Myths About Using Wheat Straw As Mulch
18:31 Using Wheat Straw In A Vegetable Garden
20:03 Final Thoughts On The Best Mulch For Gardening
20:50 Adventures With Dale
All the wood chips are good and straw is well. I’m hesitant using hay.
I use whatever is available, and honestly as long as the mulch is a few inches thick with at least the top 1" being composed of something that inherently contains many small air spaces with thin walls and minimally-connected surface area (straw, a mix of small twigs +/- leaves +/- scythed grass and/or weeds or hay) you get the absolute best results.
FYI, you want to put solid mulch underneath hollow mulch, not the other way around.
The reason for that is that having a top layer of hollow mulch acts like a thatch roof in almost every respect: it has extremely high insulation value because of the many small and non-continuous air spaces with minimal solid-to-air ratios and thus the heat in the top layer of exposed stems is vented within that same layer and is minimally transferred to lower layers thanks to the minimal surface contact between individual stems. The only difference between the mulch and the roof is that the horizontal angle, open ends on both sides, and loose packing of the mulch allows for free vertical movement of rain and other sources of condensed water vapor that contact the mulch, such as fog or dew drops.
The main differencesbetween the cooling effect provided by sun- and surface- exposed solid vs hollow mulches that are in direct contact with the soil are:
1) Solid mulches will always capture and retain more environmental water within themselves than hollow mulches, because they have more continuous mass and similar or greater moisture-retaining qualities compared to hollow dry mulches, which is not a big deal during heavy rains but can be pretty significant if you are only getting like .1 inches at a time with several hours or days of sunlight and/or wind between such events , because a significant portion of such small volume precipitation will never reach the deeper layers of mulch or the soil beneath, and will instead be lost to evaporation before they can benefit the plants. Dew only happens twice per day, morning and evening, and the water volume delivered per square inch is very small, so it automatically counts as a low-volume precipitation event.
2) Solid mulches have more direct contact with the soil, and thus wick more moisture from the contact layer. The fewer and larger airspaces between such mulches allow for greater airflow within and between the mulch layers, which will always result in greater losses to evaporation. This is especially wood mulch of any type, as bark mulches tend to contain hydrophobic resins (especially conifer barks) that are slow to degrade and will not wick as much moisture as wood.
The advantage of having lignified mulches like wood in direct soil contact is that you are providing a nutrient substrate that promotes a more "balanced" microbiome in terms of bacteria vs fungi vs protozoa.
If you simply place a top layer of hollow mulch on top of this then you can get the best of both worlds, so to speak.
This is both cheap and remarkably effective, because every new year's layer of wood/bark (solid layer) will compress the previous straw (hollow) layer, thus promoting its breakdown by increasing the decomposing straw's contact area with soil and increasing nutrient availability for the new feeder roots that aleays invade newly-forming humus.
At the same time, the new straw layer on top of the new wood/bark layer minimizes temperature variations and moisture loss, while maintaining aeration and minimizing evaporative losses.
This works every bit as well as it sounds, and I don't think that's too surprising... it's just a more efficient application of known material properties and the physics underlying said properties compared to a solid top layer with a hollow bottom layer.
Annual rye cover crop for winter. Then it dies in SC heat and becomes mulch. Turned my sand into soil after one season. Tied with chipped hardwood tree leaves chopped fine.
We use chipped hardwoods. We have a plethora of Black Locust that coppices and grows back quickly. Our worms, chickens, and soil bacteria love it.
I like cover crops in garden, I do like hardwood mulch for trees except in times of heavy rain, which living on the gulf Coast happens a lot. I've had trees die from root rot.
I use mulched leaves on top of the straw…. Stops the straw seed from germinating! I’m a big user of straw. I agree with your analysis!
Remember Clover is a nitrogen fixer & is helpful in soil regeneration.
I used last year's wheat straw to mulch my new raised strawberry beds, and it IS great at holding moisture, the only problem is that I have bunches of wheat sprouting everywhere.
Exactly!
JUICE it ! wheat juice is awesome for us & very expensive now. or if you have pets they will like it.
I have used wheat straw as a mulch for over wintering my grapes in zone 3. I do get a lot of volunteer wheat plants growing the next year but they are easy to pull out my
You’re a very good teacher. Thank you!
I appreciate that! You're welcome!
Discovered this older video today.
I am in upper NW VA, zone 6b. I went with straw on all my foot paths in the garden this year. I use a fine pine mulch in my raised beds as it breaks down faster and has led to a better soil composition over the years. At the end of the season I cover those beds with a thick layer of straw which is easily removed in the spring.
The added benefit to straw over wood chips on my foot paths is that it makes kneeling for work in the beds much easier on my knees. Kneeling on the chips might as well have been gravel.
I have used chopped organic wheat straw, it occasionally has a couple of seeds, but not a big deal. I piled it high trying to hill potatoes, which turned out to be not very effective (super healthy plants, but not a lot of tubers) but the amazing thing was for next year I now have a completely broken down pile of dirt. I'm in zone 5b, excited to grow in the much improved soil in the spring. My fall lettuce loved it too.
Straw is excellent as mulch, but as you said, the key is to apply it constantly. Every 6-12 months, placing a thick layer will provide best results. It takes years to build good soil, but in time, you'll have better and better results. Soil is like wine and cheese - it gets better with age when you do it right!
i put a 6 to7 inch layer on all my32 inch walkways with exposed 12 inch wide beds dusted with crumbled straw bits as bed covering only water during germination and the hottest times and I am in inland CA.. love straw as insulator carbon supplement and worms galore! easy on the feet
Many people mistake hay for straw. You are much more likely to have seeds sprout from hay than you are from straw. Great video!
Straw is the base of the grain left over after the seeds have been harvested, so it is much lower in seed content. It will, however, still contain seeds. It's a good idea to buy your straw bales 2 months ahead of when you'll use them so you can stack them and let them get beaten up by the rain and sun to kill all the seeds and wash off/burn off any residual herbicide/pesticide than may exist.
I plan to mulch my new raised strawberry bed with wheat or oat straw, not sure which it is but is certainly stalky like wheat. Have several bales left from last year I never used. So today after watching a video about cutting up the straw finer, I bought a Worx WG 509 blower / vacuum mulcher just today to chop the straw into finer mulch. Hope it works as well for me.
I live in in the desert wheat straw mulch has been a miracle for my trees !
I'm glad you're able to get it in the desert! It's even sometimes tough to find here on the rainy coast. I imagine the stuff is practically free in the Midwest. It's *awesome* stuff.
I didn't realize you live in SE N.C. where I do, so this is going to really help me. I had to move from my last place and left my banana tree in the first year. Ordering another in about a week. You can get free mulch at some of the landfills also.
I love the long format videos and the second channel for digest pieces, new sub here, just picked up gardening (have a head start w parents) three weeks ago and I’m going hard bro. Thank you so much for the helpful info, love from Baja
Thank you! I'm so happy to hear you're enjoying the channels! Thank you for watching.
Atwoods in Oklahoma, 'square straw bale', $9.99. Probably still cheaper than bags of hardwood. I may try it this next spring, but I'll probably still supplement with alfalfa pellets as a fertilizer. Trying to fix the soil organically as well as moisture retention.
Also, we all hear different rumors in gardening, but the one I heard is not to use 'hay' bales because there is a ton of seed in them and to make sure what you are purchasing is 'straw' bales, so maybe that's why you didn't get a bunch of seeds.
If you are still having trouble with the prickly vine from the neighbors (almost a year later), something I have had luck with is Tordon RTU. Don't spray it on. It's pretty potent and you don't want it getting picked up by the wind. Instead, pour a tiny amount into a small container and use a thin paint brush to paint it on the leaves. I did that this year on a flowering quince that has been coming up underneath my cholla and killing it. I cut the quince down to 3 or 4 inches and delicately (VERY delicately) painted the stubs and so far it hasn't come back and the cholla is looking better.
I use wheat straw as mulch as well, but to be fair to the woodchips, you had a really thick layer of straw on your banana beds. If you had the same amount of woodchips as you did straw, they would perform just as well at weed suppression as the straw did.
I put wheat straw on my raised beds last winter. I did have a lot of wheat growing it has been very easy to pull. I was at a conference and presenter suggested aging the bales a year before using so the seeds will die. I am going to try that.
Pretty good video man really enjoyed it. I do believe the bananas being taller and shading the wheat straw more so maybe caused it not to break down as much? Or for weeds to germinate?? . The Mulch was definitely exposed a lot more.
It's entirely possible - even likely - that the mulch being exposed in those cages for 4 months getting constantly hit by rain, sun, and freezing nights, totally destroyed 100% of the wheat seed. It's pretty common to order in compost and let the pile sit and age before spreading to ensure it's fully composted, so why not do that with straw? Buy the bales of straw early, let them sit out for 3-4 months in the rain and sun to degrade, then spread them. That's a way to ensure they won't contain viable seed and any herbicide leftover is inert.
I also use wheat straw. I go one step further I have a old paper cutter and I cut the straw in 2 inch pieces and put it around the plants
That sounds a little labor intensive, no? Have you ever considered dumping the straw and running a lawnmower over it with a bag on, then dumping the bag? I just did that with some old sweet potato vines, and it did a good job.
Your clear explanation and full coverage of your topic was excellent! Then you even reviewed everything. Great job! I appreciate a talk that is clear and understandable without unnecessary repetition and words like “um”. I’m subscribing. 🙂
I so agree! I hate ums, uhs, and you-knows. He is articulate
Agreed! A good technique for making a bed for tomatoes or anything; double dig a trench, lay six inches of straw in the bottom. It will squash with the weight of soil on top. Before filling in, pee on the straw and rhe nitrogen in it will start to break it down. It will act like a sponge to hold water and nutrients for the roots .
People might not like your comments, 😂 BUT…. You are correct!
@@cjboac9864 Yes, it might seem an offensive way if getting nitrogen but it's available! Forever! I've heard that the so refined in the art of living Japanese use #2 and grow very healthy plants.
Err, maybe do that at night though so that your neighbors don't call the police because of you peeing outside.
Good content. I use wood chip for pathways between beds.
I used sugar cane mulch in the past but stopped due to the chemical fertilisers and pesticides used by commercial farmers.
I now cut my own Rhodes grass. Grass clippings and leaves.
I am now purposely growing legume shrubs to go in the mix.
I pile it for a few weeks then use it as mulch.
When I use wood chip I put cardboard down first. I use cardboard around all my trees now. I cover it with some compost and grasses, as that diminishes I top up with woodchip. Long winded but I'm not buying mulches so it gives me time.
BTW I noticed your figs. Not many leaves. I recently got a fig. The leaves on my fig vanish almost as soon as they grow. They curled. Had rust and got eaten. The fig kept growing though, producing fruit.
End of Winter here now ( zone 10 ) so temps down to single figure Celsius. No Fruit, but producing new leaves.
Hardwood bark mulch it's all I use I'm happy with it. Straw mulch for strawberry plants.
That’s what I’ve always used, but if you’re paying for it and you have an option, I really feel the straw is better. Hardwood often costs more if you’re paying for it.
I have what’s called a grab and go bag of straw I got for my chickens and mulched my fall veg garden. I didn’t realize it was full of wheat seeds till it seeded like crazy. I’m curious to see what happens in the spring. I’ve been picking the grass for the chickens in the mean time. Otherwise I love it. It seems to allow great cover that has air in it, it’s so light with lots of life going on on top of the soil.
Throw your straw in with your chickens as they will clean all of the seed out for you. After a couple of weeks it is manured and ready to put on your garden.
My advantage and success is probably because the straw sits in those banana cages for 4 months and decomposes, getting blasted by rain, sun and freezing temps, before spreading. By the time I spread the straw in March or April, any leftover seed is long rotted. It is probably good practice to buy your straw bales and let them sit out in the elements for a few months to begin breaking down and ensure not just the seed is destroyed, but any trace herbicide has gone inert.
The chickens will love to eat the seed. Some who keep chickens grow some wheat so they always have it available for them.
excellent video, have bookmarked it for future reference.
one note tho, at 3:27 I believe you mispoke. UV rays do not cause the evaporation, rather it's Infrared rays which agitate and 'heat' the water molecules, changing them to vapor. : )
Wheat straw can be expensive in many areas. There is also growing concern regarding persistent herbicides used in many grain crops to prevent weeds. These herbicides can destroy a vegetable garden. I live in the northeast and feel that shredded leaves and grass clippings as economical and safe mulch material.
Very timely video for me...I'm using straw mulch for the first time on my winter garden. Thanks for the knowledge!🙂 I'm glad you and Dale had a sweet Thanksgiving Day.🙂
I'm glad to hear it was timely. Every day with Dale is a great day. We had good weather and he was in his element harassing everyone in the house for food. There is a *reason why* HOUND has become a verb!
Straw is the stalk after the grain (seed head) is harvested so it there are very few seeds. Hay is made up of whole plants & if not harvested before seeds develop, can contain many seeds.
Precisely. Straw is a byproduct of the wheat harvest, so in theory, the seeds should be mostly removed. Allowing the straw bales to sit out in the weather for 3-6 months to begin decay can also be beneficial. That's what I sort of did by using them to insulate my bananas for 5 months prior to use. The result: ZERO weeds.
If done lightly for seedlings to pop but still need shaded soils and wind protection straw will send up tons of volunteers. Key is so what wheat is great grass with loads of benefits. Green fert or actually harvesting. The wheat. Bud I plan on doing a heavy layer to stop all unwanted growth after seedling develop
Also did not let sit like in bananas trees so that also helped imo
In college, I took horticulture classes and we did a huge landscaping project as part of our class. We brought in dump trucks of double hammered hardwood mulch and we planted everything from trees, shrubs, perennials and annuals in 18" of nothing but that. Wheat straw is hard to get in Texas. And what I did get at Tractor Supply in compressed bales killed everything like it burned them. Contacted Tractor Supply and was informed it had herbicide residue still in. Being in compressed bales with plastic wrap, it compounded the problem.
That sounds extremely unusual. If you purchase straw bales, you can purchase them 3-6 months ahead of time and let them sit out in the rain and sun. That'll mitigate any potential problems. Treat straw just like you would treat compost - let it sit out and age for awhile before spreading.
Great video. What a cool straw/banana trick - that's awesome! Never heard the term Weed Penetration before, but my inner child kept laughing every time you said it. I need to grow up.
FYI - I also have a small car...found out my local wood/mulch place delivers (great for a big load), but they also allow you to drive your car in and fill up yourself. You just put your car on a scale before and after. I bought some 10 gallon fabric pots with handles that work very well to transport, but others use rubbermaid bins, trash bags, buckets, etc. They even offer a free day once a month where everyone with small cars show up to help themselves!
I’ve used straw mulch in all of my containers this season. In about half of those, huge clumps of grass is growing. When I emptied the pots to recycle it into my compost, I observed the root system of those grasses. They were taking over the pots with long, thick, and numerous roots.
My solution is cover cropping and termination to grow your own mulch. Peas/legumes are the preference. Don’t let them flower. Cut them down in warmer climates or let frigid winter conditions due it for you.
Slimy, wet, decaying wheat straw, or any kind of straw, can become a super magnet for SLUGS. I tried growing potatoes in hay, and slugs ate them all up.
I think you should thin your banana plants & water them more. (A lot more.) Maybe to three or four mother-baby pairs. Or two grandma-mom-baby trios. (I prefer trios as insurance to storms & frosts).
Also, they look lonely. Plant some taros, ginger & chili peppers there, too. Trust me, they are friends & need the same humid environment.
A papaya near the edge (more sunlight) will do great, too. It won’t tolerate wet feet as much as taro.
Think humid tropical jungle- their original home.
Fun tips:
1. You can culture some edible mushrooms under there for fun.
2. Tabasco pepper plants will not bear much fruits there but you can harvest the leaves. Cook “tinola”. Best with green papayas.
3. Use the banana leaves as wrappers when steaming & roasting food.
4. After harvesting, chop down the banana plant & use it as mulch. Same with the peels. Earthworms love it! That will give the daughter banana plant more space & nutrients to grow.
5. Make that banana patch a turbo-compost place. Tuck your kitchen wastes, egg shells & cartons, etc under the mulch. Let volunteer chili peppers grow.
6. Banana & taro are very thirsty plants. Fortunately, they like gray water. Put your washing station beside them-washing produce, garden implements, or outdoor shower.
7. Banana blossoms are edible.
8. Practice permaculture.
Just a note on wheat straw. Check with the farmer who grew it if u can. A lot of wheat is sprayed with roundup to kill the wheat the last week in the field so the wheat dries down evenly. It's called enhanced harvest. It may not hurt your plants initially but it harms the soil life.
The straw gets trucked in from various suppliers at most retailers, so you're going to get different straw from different locations at different times. Unless you're buying direct, it would be difficult if not impossible to tell. I think the fear of herbicides is vastly overstated, because in order for herbicides to be effective, the concentration has to be high enough to be toxic. The chances of wheat straw having so much herbicide on it that's still active and hasn't degraded yet that it could actually harm your soil is slim, and if you're truly concerned, simply let it sit out in the rain and sun for 3-6 months. It'll be fully washed away and inert by then. It's pretty common to not use compost immediately and let it age first, so this isn't unreasonable. I know the straw isn't harming anything, because when you pull it up, the soil underneath is lovely. Let it sit out for awhile before use, and the problem should be solved.
Not so with grazon, it overt persistent
@@TheMillennialGardener please do research on Grazon
Doesn’t easily break down
Pine needles are bailed here like square bails of hay and sold at hardware and gardening stores. Long needle pine is used and farmed just for this. We use cardboard covered with pine needles and that lasts one year to be composted the next year. They do not make the soil more acidic. The yellow long needle pine tree so common in Georgia has a new use! We have raked up some from the yard and put them around blue berries, figs, tomatoes, egg plants, peppers, any single stem plant. We do water more so the water gets past the mulch to the soil and soaks down to the roots. Once watered then, this works best for us so far.
After using every thing from grass clippings to seaweed eel grass, my go to mulch for veggies and annuals is pine needles. Never a shortage of curbside piles around my NE NJ neighborhood and all for free. Excellent weed suppression, water retention, very slow to decay, permeability in both directions, and due to the barbed nature of the needle, extreme wind resistance. Hardwood mulch is better at promoting an anaerobic environment/fungal microbiome best suited for deciduous plants and trees whilst softer less compacting mulches promote aerobic conditions better suited for veggies and other annuals particularly under wetter conditions. Wheat straw would be my second choice but, it's not free for the taking at my location.
Are you not concerned about Grazon being in the straw ??
I’m handicapped and have an electric scooter, I just got baby chicks so I use a large Christmas tree bag in my mini van to haul bales of hay. Their nice the feed store puts them in the bag for me and since they hold a large artificial Christmas tree, you can zip it completely open to place the bale on then zip it up, it has heavy duty straps for carrying.A strap on each end for pulling as I drive my scooter around back, plus their waterproof even though I put it in a lg tube with wheels, makes it easier to roll in and out of my pen. No mess in van or smell of hay. Also can haul bags of feed. I also carry an extra bag in the van. Got them after Christmas from Amazon they were 2 to a package.
I went today to purchase this Harwood Bark... I guess they don't have it anymore, so I purchased the DECO BARL MEDIUM NUGGETS, they look all natural, no paint or anything. I hope I did a good purchase.
This was great! Your clear explanation has been incredibly useful! Thank you!
Living in Australia, we have the opportunity to use sugarcane mulch.
This tends not to harbour seeds.
And the problem I have found with woodchip mulch, which I love for flower beds, is that it can encourage white ants, which are quite prevalent in certain areas.
But sugarcane mulch is excellent for all veggie beds.
As far as seeing grass sprouting in the straw, its mostly just whatever grain the straw came from. It pulls easy and I just lay it back down as green manure..
Yep, that's true. For me, I never had to pull a single blade. I had zero germination. That being said, one of the biggest sources of "weeds" in my garden are volunteer tomato and pepper plants! It can get pretty annoying come July 😂
Have u tried Manny cucumbers? Here in Texas, they have been a game changer for me especially for making pickles.
I've used straw in my raised beds since day 1. It's really good. I rarely water and hardly ever see a weed. If one does pop up, it pulls out, root and all, really easily.
I feel the best ways to mulch is using bark/wood chips in the fall and straw in the spring
Pine straws pretty good and available for our area and you don't have to worry about seeds and grazon
I've used pine straw in the past. My main issue with pine straw is I'm not a huge fan of the look, and it constantly blows away. It is good stuff, though, in terms of function. If I had a truck, I'd probably go get myself a few trash bags full. I have been collecting the falling needless my rear property and spreading where I can. I've gotten myself about 20 free gallons so far and I've been dumping them under my citrus trees.
I don't think my straw is wheat straw and this year a bale is $15! But I've been using straw and wow when it finally breaks down in a mix of soil it's like the black gold people talk about.
I agree that mulch is the most important component on the soil. It protects the soil, keeps it moist, suppress weeds, it makes compost in between layer of the soil and mulch, saves time and effort in watering, composting, overthinking, its simply dumping all rotting materials on top.
I have grown tomatoes in strawbales for 3 years. I started because I was renting, but it has always works. And in then I would mow it in the spring. I noticed that the best soil was under the bales and rotated. Now I use the bales for insulation in winter and mulch in summer = great combo.
That sounds like a good plan. If you let a straw bale sit in a position for a couple months and then pick it up, you'll find a ton of bugs underneath, especially in the winter. They're keeping warm, and slowly chomping away, decomposing the bale and improving the soil underneath. They're really great!
Yeah, i bought wheat straw for rabbit bedding, and use it all the time for plant beds. Never had an issue with weed seeds.
You may get a couple seedlings here and there, but they pull easily. We had a warm December, so I did have a few sprouts. Just run your hand through the mulch layer for 3 seconds and they all come out.
Hay is better for rabbits.
We use dried out grass clippings to maintain moisture in the soil in summer heat. Great info 👍
That works great, as long as you don't have recent herbicide treatments on your lawn or your grass isn't full of seed tops. I can't use the grass clipping from my lawn, because it's a Southern grass - Centipede. The seed tops are nasty, and if I were to use it, I'd have rhizomous weeds everywhere.
@@TheMillennialGardener Good point, we do not use herbicides on the lawn!
I use a chaff marketed as feed for horses as bedding for my chickens. It is composed of chopped straw and alfalfa. After cleaning out the coop I put it in my compost bins but it would name a great mulch also
😅
Thanks!
Thank you so much for your support and generosity! I really appreciate it ❤
You need to know that the straw you get was not prayed with the poisons.
I bought straw for my garden and was somewhat pleased with it.But it did not fair well in my strawberries and I have been inundated with weeds. It was great in my garlic bed I planted last fall. I’m not entirely convinced yet. But do think it is one of the better mulches.
An inch of rain in the last 30 days would be nice. Currently at maybe .2" in the last 2 months. Going to be a pretty dry winter here.
I've never been that interested in straw for a mulch as I can't quite guarantee that it hasn't been hit with a broadleaf herbicide before harvest (same with some types of manure that might have residual amounts that can affect your plants). I don't use herbicides and would rather not be accidentally bringing them onto the property if I can easily avoid it. I think some annual vegetables that might be particularly sensitive are tomatoes or peppers. I'd be much more on board if there was a way to know where you were getting your straw from locally.
Now... I could just get more of my "native" areas of the yard growing with warm season grasses. With the little bit I have already, I might get a decent amount by the end of the season as the grasses will readily get to 3' tall (which leaves a quite a bit of straw below the seed heads). I think there are some specific plants that don't appreciate the amount of moisture that wood chips hold (strawberries come to mind, I'm trying to get a patch established in the front yard).
For cost, I get a 12-15 cubic yard truck load of arborist woodchips for about $90 (delivery charge from a specific arborist, no chipdrop here). I'm not sure bales of straw could ever compete with that.
FWIW, my perception of seed germination suppression has mostly been on two things: new seeds that blow onto the ground can't physically get to the soil and the temperatures in mulch are a bit less than uncovered soil. Keeping the mulch thick has been pretty useful for me. If I want some seedlings to come up, I'll pull the mulch back and drop a handful of seeds in under the mulch. They might not germinate quickly due to lower temperatures, but I have decent success in the long run. I mostly do this for native plants that germination might be tricky anyway (long cold stratification period, etc).
It's relative. Drought here can be more damaging than drought your way in theory, because we have a fire risk orders of magnitudes higher than out West since every spare inch of the unpaved ground is covered in brush and debris. When things get dry here, our fire weather risk goes through the roof. We have so much vegetation here that the demand on our water table is absolutely enormous, so drought on the East Coast can compound rather rapidly. I'm not complaining - we already exceeded our annual rainfall back in September, here, and I'm enjoying the non-stop clear blue skies. It's a nice break, and I know the rain will return soon. That's the reason why I love "drought" on the East Coast - there is really no such thing, because they're all so short-term. The problem with drought out West is that it can last for years.
If you are concerned about herbicides, simply stack the straw up, hose it down and let it sit in the sun for 3-6 months. Nothing will degrade chemicals faster than non-stop UV rays. I think it's a *really* overstated problem, and one of those "problems" that only exists because fears on the internet beat it to death. But, of course, if you can get another source of mulch for free or more easily locally that's cheaper and works just as well, there's no reason to go through the trouble. I've been trying to get arborist woodchips for years, and nobody will come out my way. I'm too far off the beaten path in a subdivision, and nobody wants to come in, even for $80. I've tried.
@@TheMillennialGardener Ugh, I would have thought with access to chipdrop, it'd be easier for you. I don't have it great (about a year waitlist before I get chips), but at least I can get them and plan around the timeframe. I have space on my property to let a giant pile of woodchips age. You're totally right that I could do the same thing with straw, let it sit and age. The sun out here is brutal. After a season the top wood chips are really bleached (two seasons they're approaching drift wood color). 7000' elevation means there's noticeably less air above me than sea level (11.3 psia versus 14.7).
We get a bit of fire danger with the reduced moisture, but it's usually year round except when we have good precipitation (usually monsoon). Winter isn't usually this dry and the winds might make for some noticeable fire conditions (red flag + excess dryness). While we don't have dense forests (I think the correct term for where I live is open woodland), the systemic drought stress on some types of trees can make them really susceptible to pests such as pine borers. Then all it takes is a camper that doesn't drench a fire and we have a couple thousand acre blaze in a day or two. Drought sucks everywhere, but yeah, we might tolerate it a little better. The native scrub brush can survive on only a few inches of rain per year. The 400 year old one-seed junipers in my back yard are some of the most drought tolerant trees around here, but some of that is from their ridiculous root systems (200+' tap roots). Native warm season grasses don't need any supplemental water. Aren't native plants cool? :D
As usual good observations. Counter intuitive as they say. Clean centipede clippings and leaves for me. Fresh, semi composted, or fully composted. I think we like to look at the bare soil after we prepare it. Looks nice till it's rained on and baked.
Are you able to get clean centipede grass clippings? Mine goes to seed so quickly that I can't do it. Centipede doesn't like being mowed a lot, so I try to let it grow 2 inches before I cut it, but it always goes to seed. I'll tell you, don't move to the coastal South if you want a nice lawn 😂
Perhaps someone can correct me…but I tried straw as a mulch in my nicely manicured raised, weed free garden beds. Atheistically it looked nice, was keeping the moisture in the soil, a bale a straw was relatively cheap,…etc. Within one week, the seeds within the straw bales began germinating. I began seeing straw grass popping up through the straw mulch. Point is…if you don’t want to be weeding wheat straw in your garden you may want to consider a different mulching material.
When you buy fresh straw bales, it's a good idea to stack them up and let them sit in the sun and rain for 1-2 months before use. Let the straw get washed from rain and baked in the sun so any residual herbicides get washed off and burnt off by the sun and any seeds get destroyed.
Use good quality straw, it has fewer weedy seeds. If you use the cheap stuff, it's often full of weeds. Learned that from experience. Also, try using lucern-hay - it has more nutrients.
The problem is cost. Bale's of straw are $5-6 from a farm supply store, but those small bags of EZ Straw are $15. You'd go broke if you had more than a couple beds. Straw itself is fairly low in weeds since the grain portion has already been harvested, but a smart way to do this is to buy your straw 3-6 months ahead of time, stack your bales in the yard, and let the sun and rain hit them for months. That will begin the decomposition process and destroy seed. Then, spread the "old straw" around your plants later.
Watching with subtitles, they make so sense, have a look. I’ll have to watch another time.
TH-cam makes the subtitles with speech recognition. For videos that have a lot of nouns or uncommon words, they're often a mess.
Wheat straw literally grew wheat all through my beds. It was a pain in the butt to pull out, and when I did, all of my compost came out with it. It made a huge mess that made us almost give up. I would never use wheat straw again in my zone 8a bed. It was full of wheat seeds, and they germinated like crazy as soon as it was exposed to rain and sunlight.
This
If you add lots of water to the straw bale and leave it for a year, most of the grain will germinate, the next year it will make a mulch with less wheat growing
I am really enjoying your videos really informative direct to the point not a lot of chitchat that means nothing. on your post video with the bananas versus the Figs those bananas consume a tremendous amount of water I use them in landscaping low lying areas that seem to hold water and they literally dry a place out so probably huge variable in the assessment
I heard to put the straw in a trench 10 inches under down and cover it back up plant over it keeps soil moist under
Thanks for the info! I would love to use wheat straw for mulch. Do we need to worry if the straw was treated with any herbicides that could harm our plants? Or maybe keeping the hay bales out in the sun for a half year previous to using them, would take care of that worry.
Personally, I do not think so. Herbicides break down pretty quickly, and by the time you get the straw to your house, it's probably been a long time since the last time it was sprayed. If you're concerned, simply stack the bales and let them sit in the rain and sun for a few months like you said. Rain and sun will wash away and degrade any remaining herbicides, as well as destroy the weed seeds. From what I've seen, old straw is better than fresh straw. Since I use them to protect my bananas for 3-4 months before spreading it as mulch, that's probably the sweet spot.
You should do some research on aminopyralid contamination. You definitely need to be concerned about it and it does not break down in only a few months.
@@eileenbeiter4569 perspective is everything. These commercial farms abuse these chemicals for generations, and despite the most reckless abuse imaginable, they still grow enormous amounts of food and attract beneficials. Where are the case studies where a guy with an organic garden brings in a few bales of straw and the data shows it contaminating their ecosystem and kills beneficials? The answer is they don't exist. I'm all for being as organic as possible for a whole host of reasons, but I don't believe in seeking out fear. Literally everything we ingest has trace contamination. The very water we drink and water our gardens with comes out of dirty pipes full of trace contaminants. Life is very resilient, and I'm 100% positive that my soil is not being harmed by using conventional straw bales. I can prove that by simply digging 3 inches deep. Don't let "perfect" be the enemy of good.
Straw from Tractor Supply in compressed bales with plastic wrap are not good.
I now have 23 small truckloads of hardwood and pine mixed chips in my backyard delivered over the summer months. But, like you, I've heard the same issues with wheat straw so I opted for the chips. 🙄 Oh well looks like the chips will have to fill the bill for a while.
If I could get that for free, I would take every pile. Unfortunately, when you have to pay for it, you have to choose. I was always afraid of straw, but now that I’ve seen it in action, I’m in love. If you’re scared, let the bales sit out in the rain all winter to rot, then use it. That should kill the seeds. Maybe that’s why I’m so lucky?
@@TheMillennialGardener Well it is "free". But after you tip the (? tree trimmers) hauling crew a 10 here and a 20 there it does add up. And good luck with even getting them started - It took me 5 or 6 years since they brought it last time. You have to run down the foreman of the crew wherever they are working and request it - and even a 20 spot there might pay off ... well it's a game with them to see who has the best "incentive" for them. 😉
@@gitatit4046 I've been offering $80 on Chipdrop for over 2 years, as well as called some local companies. I've yet to be successful 😥 Location has a lot to do with it. I think I'm too far out of the city and too far out of the way, and they really don't like going to subdivisions. For 10-20 yards of wood chips, I'd gladly offer $100! Mulch is $40 a yard. A 10-yard delivery is easily over $400. Even $100 would be a steal.
@@TheMillennialGardener That's right. I don't mind the tipping since I know I'm getting a bargain in the end. BUT the hassle and frustration of trying to get it delivered is a different matter. I guess we do what we gotta do in the long run. I wish you luck on your end.
@@TheMillennialGardener - I had the terrible experience with straw bale bought in Home Depot: it was all full of seeds. I almost killed my strawberries with germinated weeds... With EZ-Straw my experience is strictly positive. No seeds in it.
I'm using free truck deliveries of wood chips as well. And free horse manure from the nearby stable. Horse manure could be dangerous, though, if they used hay with herbicides...
My experience with wheat straw was a nightmare, it filled my bed with endless sprouts from the seeds in the straw, then also you don't know what herbicides they used on it in the field. Not for me. I love your garden and banana trees. Thank you for sharing.
Are you sure you used straw and not hay? Straw is a byproduct, and it usually contains few seeds. You can easily prevent this, though, by buying your wheat straw 2 months before you use it. Buy your bales, stack them and let them sit in the sun and rain. That will destroy the seed, and it will degrade and wash off any residual pesticide that may have once be sprayed.
I found a good and relatively cheap straw in local Ace Hardware store. It's called EZ-straw. I used it to mulch tomatoes.
They sell that at Tractor Supply, but it's $16 a bag. It's a beautiful product, but it's the same size as the hardwood mulch bags at Lowe's for $3. If you have small beds, I'm sure it works well, but I'd go broke buying as much as I need. Unless you have a much cheaper source. A bale of straw is $5 and will have 4 times the coverage. The bales of straw will not be as nice, but you can always let the straw sit outside and rot for a few months if you want to make sure the seeds have decayed.
@@TheMillennialGardener - yes, it makes sense.
Wheat is also considered an Allelopathic plant, meaning that that the plant releases natural plant suppressant compounds that prevent other plant seeds from germinating near them; hence such plants as sunflowers and walnut trees that have these same effects on competing plants that try to grow near them.
After time the wheat straw looses these weed suppressant properties as it decomposes over time. I find wheat straw a very good mulch!
Thanks
Thank you so much for your support and generosity! I really appreciate it ❤
That is so brilliant what you did with your banana trees! I'm in 8a too, so I have hope now :)
There is no best mulch in my opinion. Different mulches for different purposes and different crops and different climates. For example here in the subtropics of Australia if you use straw too thick then it goes anarobic. Forms a layer that can also be hard for moisture to get through. Every mulch has a purpse except the artifical dyed ones. They all have different decompostition rates and different fungi and bacteria feed on different mediums. I use a multitude of differnt mulches and trial them to see how they go. Different textures in the garden is also very beautiful. Woodchip here, leaf mulch over there and some straw round the place as well . I enjoyed the video and information just sharing my experience.
Agreed, I like to use different materials, mixed together or just when I get something at a certain moment, I go with that. Straw should never be too thick and never walked over, that reasonably prevents it from becoming anaerobic, but never completely.
I generally agree with your premise. The "best" mulch is the mulch that you can get and afford. I really enjoy straw, but if somebody gave me a giant truckload of arborist woodchips, I'd take that every time over paying for straw. My point is, if you're paying for it, straw probably has the best balance of weed suppression and cost benefit. It's cheaper than the bark mulches, and it provides better weed suppression. If you live in a place where your neighbors put out bags of leaves this time of year and you can take them for free, that's even better. Anything free and natural is the way to go.
Tractor Supply sells a bail with 5 different hay. Alfalfa barley and I forget but it's killer bedcover
It has not only micro and macro beneficials but its all soaked with Mollasis.
Great info, as usual, and timely. I was just researching mulch since I've had to move to another state (KY). I found some concern that wheat straw causes a mold problem due to moisture retention and the way it compacts. And what do you think about the idea that some mulches can change the soil PH?
Any mulch is going to cause some fungal growth, but it's generally beneficial. I have been stuffing my bananas for a couple seasons with straw, and I've never had a problem. I'm very impressed by it. I think mulches changing soil pH is largely overstated, since most things are fairly neutral. Wheat straw isn't going to affect pH much. Neither will pine straw. Pine bark may lower pH some, but you need to constantly reapply it to keep the effect going. Hardwood bark is mildly alkaline, but again, you need to constantly reply to keep the effect going. Most people afraid of soil pH issues work hard to get arborist woodchips since they're often a hugely diverse blend that "balances out." In short, most readily available mulches won't affect soil pH enough that most plants will not tolerate it.
@@TheMillennialGardener Pine straw??? Hooray! I got a yard full! Can I add the banana peels and egg shells to those? Thank you so much for this discussion!!!
@@mousiebrown1747 yes!
Agree In all areas! Have found the same to be true, although I did get one batch of wheat straw that had some trace herbicides and my plants showed the signs, but, my soil biological was so good, they grew out of it pretty quickly. One note though regarding mulching your veg garden with the straw. It WILL DEFINITELY draw in the snails more. (At least in my area, anyway) Zone 8B, But I just know in advance and set out my baby food jars with cheap beer and they die happy! 🤔😄
Regarding the herbicide, it is probably good practice to buy the straw bales and let them sit for a few months before use. Letting them rot some will ensure the seed is dead and any trace herbicide is destroyed. I, thankfully, haven't had issues with snails (yet), but iron phosphate is quite effective and cheap.
@@TheMillennialGardener thank you for that. I have huge piles of sprayed horse hay that is used for running horses so it is really sprayed. It has been sitting for three years and has started to decompose. Do you think that would be safe for my garden?
@@patticriss2238 sprayed with what? If herbicides nope no way
Many people including myself use straw, it's an old old gardening technique thru the ages. Nowadays it's tough to find organic straw but it's worth it, otherwise you can ruin your garden with herbicides used on the grains (they even spray wheat to force it to ripen prior to harvest). Yes there's seeds in the straw (not as bad as hay) however they easily come out, much easier than weeds in bare soil! and you just lay them on top of the straw where they shrivel up and add a bit of nitrogen.
Aged Wood And leaf mulch is what I use. Be careful of the wheat hay, a good amount of is is sprayed with a chemical called grazon for weed control. Once sprayed with this chemical it will deter your garden plants if used as a mulch.
A simple way around that is to just let it sit out in the rain for a few months before using it. Those sprays have a pretty short half life, especially when exposed to full sun and rain. Letting it decompose will also kill off any active seeds.
Because of a lack of other biomass, I started using larger grass stalks and other stalks, bigger materials, and I'm impressed though it doesn't look that great.
I realize this video is a few months old and I'm just catching up. However, what about the resource you got the wheat straw from? As any supplement to your food when your trying to be natural as possible with no harsh chemicals...
Wonderful video as usual👍
Thank you! I appreciate it!
Mulch helps keep the roots cooler too. Best root temp in mid 60F
I also use barley straw for my plants with the occasional barely that pops up..Quick question do you attract banana spiders? since you have been growing them.Great video very informative..
Neighbors like "This guys bananas!" Lol, love it!
I used wheat straw one year and never again!! I spent WAY too much time pulling wheat seedlings! My preference is ground corn stalks.
Thank you again for another great video! Are you finding that straw mulch is still your go to, even with the added issue of the recent added complexity of strong herbicides like Grazon & others being used in US grain fields? I found this when using store bought manure compost, it caused my plants to die & literally sterilized the areas of my soil for at least 2 years that I used it on. I'm hoping you're still having great success with wheat straw so that I can do that too! :)
Hello from NW Florida! Are live oak tree leaves okay for mulch? I have plenty of those, however, they take forever to breakdown.