We are expecting visitors of the creepy crawly slimy kind (see below). So to keep the weeds down and prepare for our visitors, I mulched with straw today.
I found straw at the local Feed Store for $6/bale. Boy did I feel country driving my pick-up loaded with three straw bales along the back roads of farm country!
Anyway, you want straw, not hay - hay is indeed for horses, and it has seeds. Apparently if you mulch with hay, you will end up with enough hay growing in your garden to feed a horse. Straw is what you want. Or you can use bark (our man Alex at the dirt store has gorilla bark or angel bark - two different shredding consistencies. And I can now tell the difference. The things I’m learning!). I put down 4-6” inches of mulch on the paths and on the corn. When seeds start coming up we’ll mulch the other areas.
Our beds now look a little like Aztec chinampas (“floating gardens”). If our wet season is as bad as our neighbors say, they may be chinampas!
