Brian comments on my recent Grocery Row Garden pictures:
“What are you using as mulch? It looks like straw, which you’ve warned against, so I imagine I’m incorrect.”
No, you’re not incorrect. It is straw. And I regularly warn people about using hay, straw, manure and various composts because of the extremely high risk of killing your garden with long-term herbicides.
As in this video:
It’s a serious issue, and you need to be really sure that your sources for mulch, manure and compost are free of these satanic ingredients.
However, that does not mean the actual amendments themselves are the problem. Straw and hay are excellent additions to the garden. We’ve used both for chicken coop bedding, mulch, compost pile additives, lasagna garden layers, storage for potatoes and more. We’ve also used manure to make compost, to layer into garden beds and as a dried addition to our potting soil mixes.
For thousands of years, they were perfectly fine to use. And now they often aren’t, thanks to the jackasses in government and Big Ag companies.
You can use hay, straw and manure if you know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that they do not contain long-term herbicide contamination.
In the case of the hay we’re using as mulch in the garden and for our compost piles, it came from a friend who does not spray his fields. This is becoming a rarity, and we are glad to support him by buying his hay any time we need it.
Just don’t trust anything you can’t verify is clean, or it can literally destroy your garden for months or years.
3 comments
Not taking any chances. Besides we can gather kudzu from a lot of places that don’t get sprayed. Between our weeds, kudzu, and our chickens the only thing we need are mineral ammendments. Maybe a few seeds.
Seriously the last thing I need is my gardens to be poisoned.
Yep.
I am raking out 1 of our chicken areas, we have 4 places to move them around. This first section had some questionable hay, do you think is it acceptable to put it around, not near, my newly planted apple trees? They are on a hill, far from my other garden areas. I am thinking the rain and sun and time will remediate the grazon, and the ground can still get the benefit of the manure… we have lots of lost woods, though, lots of places to put it that are, right now, unusable. Thanks for your thoughts, David, even though I am zone 6 now, still watching and learning.