Do you find that the hay brings in weed seed or diseases? I've often worried about that being the case. Seems like it would be cheaper than landscape/weed cloth.
i have an old collection of garden books collected over the years; the best and more interesting of them are organic. Most of the problems cited in this thread are just retreads of problems people always have had.
Hay and mulch are very simple things and solve most of your garden issues. Weed seed is brought in by everything, your soil contains hundreds of thousands of weed seeds.
Hay is the short cut.
Hay is basically a mulch; we have tons of it as we don't mow all of our rural property. So easy to make too, but don't let our way of doing it shock you too much. Um, we make hay by just pulling the long grass with our hands and stacking it in a mulch pile.
that's it, and free!
That's the difference between the $64 tomato and free. i note that many resort to dumping a truck load of money on a problem hoping it will go away. Sometimes it does.
Hay is free and grows every where in the Rural areas. Same for leaves and other materials. We get truck loads of compost from the Dairys around, just pay for trucking. Compost (composted manure) solves most of your other issues. Almost free too, sorry don't know where i can get a free dump truck with free gas.
Try putting hay or mulch around your tomatoes. When the heat comes the tomatoes are able to resist it. The weeds don't like growing through the mulch, so they don't. The worms love eating mulch, so they do and then feed the tomatoes, much better fertilizer than the junk in the bag.
Soil is a living medium and does better if not treated like a chemistry set. Read Edward Faulkner's book 'Soil Development', he took a worn out farm and added nothing to it, the soil has everything it needs to rejuvenate itself if properly cared for. Even the bugs go away when the plants are healthy, they like to chump on $64 tomatoes instead. Free tomatoes are not as tastey to pests, so tend not to bother them.
Edward Faulkner is an extreme organic gardener, but he wanted to prove a point that God created the world right in the first place, so he worked with the worst and produced the best crops around. His book 'Plowmans Folly' was a best seller. In this book he opposed deep moldboard plowing because the plow would take the deep subsoil and put it on top of the soil, burying the top soil and destroying organic matter in the process.
And then we got the dust bowls in the thirties.
Faulkner is a hero of American agriculture, a County extension agent that thought outside the box and was not afraid of the naysayers and gloomers. Today i note these moldboard plows are not used much where i live, we used to get dust bowls in the spring, but now the disc is what the farmers use to prep the soil, nice move. Faulkner also approved of the chisel plow for breaking up hard pan and any lite plowing that did not bring the subsoil up.
My Rototiller saves me from the weeds, it seems best to grow 2-3 rows of vegies close together and have 3 feet of space between them for the roto tiller to cultivate the weeds. Even better is to have a mulch between rows and this happens as we pull more hay.
We don't use fencing either. Living in a rural area there are thousands of acres of corn and beans growing, my little garden of corn and beans is hardly noticed by the criters. We grow extra any way, stuff happens to anyone.
Pulling hay with your hands? Must be work? Everything is work, we ride our bicycles, fish, and play; can never understand that argument.
Maybe they mean it is harder than watching TV? :confused2:
