Sprouting straw
Mark and I were thrilled to get our summer purchase of straw last month...until
it started to sprout. That's right, I laid down several bales of
straw in the vegetable garden as mulch, figuring the straw would do its
usual weed-suppressing job, but the mulch turned out to be a source
of weeds. Looking more closely, I saw that the grain heads were
full of seeds --- seems like our supplier forgot to thresh before he
baled.
Mark's immediate answer
was: "Let's buy a flame weeder!" But I decided to try a low-tech
solution first. As I've been weeding this week, I've grabbed hunks
of seedling-filled straw and flipped it over as a unit. I'm
hopeful that the baby grain plants will be smothered by this cruel
treatment and will give up the ghost.
In the meantime, I'm setting aside the rest of these bales of straw to use as deep bedding
in the coop, where our chickens will be glad to remove the
grains. Looks like we'll have to hit up the feed store for some
replacement straw for the garden.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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I feel your pain. The same thing happens to us all the time. It's impossible to predict which source of straw is going to be good this year or not. After getting over the initial irritation, I've discovered that those sprouts are easy to remove whenever I get around to it. I'm not big into bending a weeding little things anymore, so I wait until they're bigger. Some of them die in the heat anyway.
BTW - Just bought the Whizbang garden idea book and love it! Thanks for the recommendation.