I FOUND STRAW! LOTS AND LOTS OF STRAW! - GREAT FOR YOUR GARDEN!
HOMESTEAD ADVICE
Be ready always to utilize and source local materials for your homestead. A lot of times, these can be had a really good prices and much cheaper than you will find at the stores. Check out your local Craigslist ads and your local printed paper for deals on compost, mulch, straw, hay, sawdust, rice hulls and anything else you can get for cheap. Straw like this will help TREMENDOUSLY to build up poor soil if that is what you are working with in your garden.
Last year I got a couple round bales of straw for the garden. It's great at protecting your soil from drying out and adds lots of nutrients to the ground for future gardens. Not to mention, mycelium fungus love straw and having mushrooms in your garden along with your plants means healthier plant roots.
But this year, the guy who was growing straw in my area didn't really have a good crop and had too many weeds in this straw as well. So I needed to find another source. You can find some amazing deals on Craigslist when it comes to stuff like this and so I kept my eyes peeled. Sure enough, I eventually found a posting of a warehouse full of new wheat straw about 2 hours away.
So I hopped in the truck and took the recently rebuilt trailer put together by @hansjurgen and set off to get some straw that I could use in the garden as well as other things!
The warehouse was huge! They had other warehouses too of different materials. These big barns are actually owned by a Mennonite farmer who lives in my town but keeps part of his business up in Missouri where I had to drive to.
I pulled my truck up to prepare to get loaded. We had to wait about 20 minutes for one of the hired hands to bring around the loader.
This is the trailer that @hansjurgen rebuilt from an old 16 foot travel trailer. He put some recycled chicken barn boards on it along with some eye bolts and it was ready to go. He also put in wiring harness for the new trailer lights. Everything worked great for the trip.
We got the straw home and will be layering it over the garden in the next couple days. We are having a good bit of rain right now but hopefully when that lets up, we can finish this quickly.
So that is our straw for the year. I wish the warehouse was closer but sometimes getting good stuff like this means you are going to have to put forth a bit of extra effort.
We have been using Lasagna style gardening since we moved here and would not have it any other way. Our soil is very healthy and you can grow almost anything in it.
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Excellent! I've made a point to only shop locally in 2018 and that means a lot of locally sourced materials. Many sheeple think I'm taking it to a bit of an extreme but it's very important to me. Good to see y'all doing the same!
Yeah and it will help to develop good working relatioships with locals.
How often do you put mulch/straw on your garden? How deep? and how big is your garden area. Was the straw starting to turn or just surplus they wanted to get ride of? Toby
This is brand new straw that they are selling. I put it down as thick as possible. I forgot how big our garden is. I will do a post on that soon.
You say "almost anything", what can't you grow well in your soil?
Onions for some reason always give me trouble. Ive never had good results. Will keep trying.
Do you have another area dedicated to just onions then? Did you do anything special, soil wise, to that area?
Woohoo!!! What a deal! We've been watching Craigslist for the gardening stuff too and will probably have to take a trip to get wheat straw and rabbit droppings in a bit. We still have too many weeks of winter to be putting everything into the garden, but it is definitely fruit tree pruning time: we're having a 60 degree heat wave today ahead of refreezing next week.
I got rabbit manure last year and I'm going to pass this year and see how it goes. Seriously there is no better manure than rabbit.
very good idea @mericanhomestead
I think people do not think about things that are very useful to make the soil fertile, to grow mushrooms and useful for others
Great Informative Post! That's A Lot Of Straw!
A good post I read it completely I'll tell you my friend that it's just super
Wow a big warehouse with lots of haystacks. work spirit @mericanhomestead
Now that is a blessing! How awesome to have it close enough to get!
that's a nice trailer! We get straw from a local dairy farm and it's made the world of difference with how our gardens perform over the summer (suppressing weeds and keeping moisture in the ground) The only issue we have is that it give slugs a place to hide so I have to stick beer traps around the garden to catch them.
A friend of mine gets pine needles and I've heard those help with slugs.
Interesting, thank you. I have access to unlimited pine around here so I will have to read up on that. I'll try anything organic. I've become quite skilled at murdering slugs in the night. It's not my favourite occupation but they can do an insane amount of damage overnight.