• Chicken waterer
• Homesteading books

I love straw...

...and I love my new straw door.  I call it the Secret Door because our helper cut it straight out of the wall of the barn, so the boards line up and you can hardly tell a door's there.

He added a few screws, two hinges, a bit of a furring strip (for the latch), and a two by four (to add structure and give the hinges someting to bite into).

Now I can stack my straw inside and access it easily for the garden.  (Or stockpile it for later.)

It's been dry enough to haul, so we're actually trying to stockpile all kinds of supplies.  Our helper told us about a straw opportunity that's presented a bit of a conundrum, though.

His friend has dozens of bales worth of loose straw in his barn to give away.  The cows got in and broke the bales apart and the friend just wants the biomass gone.  Sounds awesome, right?

The problem is that the straw was grown in rotation with tobacco, which means it's probably full of tomato blight.  I honestly don't know enough about the blight fungi to determine how much would be present on straw --- the fungi only live on members of the tomato family, but they also stick around in the soil and could have splashed up onto the straw during a rain.  I also don't know how far I'd need to keep the straw away from a tomato-growing area to prevent adding more blight to our mix, or how deep in a kill mulch I'd have to hide it.

So, do I want the free biomass or not?  I'm a bit too giddy with my straw door to think straight right now.  Maybe you can help me decide?