permaculture

[Loren Davidson <lorenstwin@yahoo.com>]

--- Claude  Genest <genest@together.net> wrote:
> Well, it's virtually impossible to get straw bales around here any
> more , or
> at least prohibitively expensive.
> 
> So, what's your experience using "Muclh Hay" ?  (i.e hay that's been
> rained
> on/ slightly rotted)

Fairly good, so long as it hasn't sprouted so much or gotten so wet and
slimy as to be difficult to handle and spread.  I find it really helps
protect the soil and encourages earthworms.  It's certainly a vast
improvement over bare ground.  

We put in a new greenhouse, a year and a half ago.  We got half of the
resultant bare ground around it mulched (with hay in varying degrees of
rottenness) before the winter rains.  That half sprouted lots of lush
grasses and had started transitioning into fertile soil by the
following summer.  The other, bare half remained largely
unchanged...until this past fall, when we finally got around to
mulching *it*.  Much better now.  And it was a good, unplanned
"experiment" in just exactly how much benefit one gets from a thorough
mulching.

And I haven't found that I get any more sprouting out of slightly
rotted hay than from dry hay or straw.

> 
> Do you reckon I'd be invirting in a lot of pernicious weeds ?
> 
>  Any suggestions on how to work around that ?

If you pull them fairly young, they're not really rooted in anything
and are easy to remove.  They also make a nice additional mulch layer.

Heck, one year I discovered that I had a volunteer wheat crop as a
result of "seed weeds" from the mulch hay that I didn't get around to
pulling up.

Finally, the slightly rotted hay can often be gotten for the hauling,
which is a *much* better price than new off the hay wagon.

Loren


=====
Loren Davidson   Permaculturist, poet, philosopher, writer
loren@farwalker.com | http://www.batnet.com/beauty/
"if your drinking water is poisoning you, if your natural-gas bill exceeds 
$400 a month, if your HMO has denied you treatment for your disease, how much 
do you care that your president isn't having sex with interns?" - J. Carroll

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