Straw gardening can ruin your garden. A bold claim, but it’s true. Here’s what you need to know to protect your harvest.
cooling architecture, CC BY-SA 3.0via Wikimedia Commons
Straw Gardening Has a Hidden Risk
Straw gardening can ruin your garden.
A bold claim, but it’s true. The evidence is mounting.
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Over the past decade or so, straw gardens have taken off.I’ve seen some really nice and clever ways straw gardening. Just a quick google image search will show you many beautiful straw gardens. It makes you want to jump right in, doesn’t it?
Are straw bales safe to use?
Unfortunately, straw bales (and hay bales) can destroy your garden for years. how? let’s see.
Those of you who haven’t read it Composting Everything: A Good Guide to Extreme Composting You might be wondering why I say straw gardening can ruin your garden.
My friend Andy knows.
My friend Luzette also knows, though her garden is destroyed by manure, not directly through straw or hay.
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When I passed in August 2012 natural awakening magazines, few people know that such a thing is around or how common it really is. I don’t know either. . . if it didn’t destroy about $1000 worth of plants.
From the very first post, the stories keep growing.
Toxic herbicides can poison gardens
I love the concept of straw gardening. it’s great. It’s fun and a quick way to get your garden going without worrying about improving the soil. You can think of straw gardening as a form of composting and gardening at the same time. The soil beneath a rotting mound of hay or straw improves amazingly after a year or so, leaving behind a humus-rich earthworm habitat.
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However, if the hay or straw comes from a field that has been sprayed with one or more persistent herbicides such as Grazon™ or CleanWave™, the vegetables in your straw garden will be destroyed. Not only that, but you can’t even compost contaminated straw because the toxins (usually aminopicolinic acid or its close cousin, clopyralid) will linger around and ruin the resulting compost.
Downstream consequences of factory farming
The reality of modern factory farming is that it is poison based farming. Grain fields such as wheat, oats, and barley, as well as hay fields, are often sprayed with herbicides to control broad-leaved weeds for a long time. “Weeds” such as blackberries and amaranth.
The toxins do not affect members of the grass family (including grains), but they are very effective at destroying most garden vegetables. I have been thanked many times by people who either saved their gardens from these poisons or finally figured out what was destroying their crops.
Many are just discovering the danger.Check out this Amazon review compost everything:
Do you know where your straws come from?
In the woods near me, many farmers have discovered the amazing efficacy of these herbicides in controlling weeds in hay fields. They’re sprayed all over the place – it’s incredible.
As the grains/grasses grow, they absorb these toxins without causing harm. Animals can also graze in fields without noticeable problems.
However, the resulting straw and dung still contain potent plant-killing power — and the toxins can linger for years.
Toxic pesticides in animal manure
My garden has received free fertilizer several times. I’ve even been told, “We don’t spray anything in our fields.” However, if the animals are eating hay from the feed store — or if there’s straw bedding in the stables — the chances of contamination are very high. high.
refuse it. you must. Otherwise something like the one I pictured above will happen to your plants.
damn.
Protect Your Straw Garden From Hidden Pesticides
image from lisa marie from Pixar
If you want to start straw gardening, how do you know if the straw has been sprayed at some point? If you have some rotting hay that you want to compost, how do you know if it contains deadly toxins?
Marjory recommends a simple test. (This test also works with stool.)
- plant an apartment beans.
- mix straw or hay with water five gallon bucket And stir frequently for a day or two.
- Then, pour water over the beans.
- Watch the beans closely to see how they react. If the second and third leaves look normal, straw, hay, or fertilizer is probably safe to use.
Note the word “maybe” in the last bullet point.If you performed this test with hay or straw of unknown origin, you would perhaps in a safer place. There’s still a little bit of risk, but it’s better than randomly using large packages without knowing their full provenance and without doing any testing first. That will explode in your face.
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You won’t know, and neither will the feed store, good luck tracing the straw bales back to a specific field so you can ask the original farmer if he’s sprayed anything in the past few years.
Bottom Line on Straw Bales and Manure
After getting permission to clean up my compost pile, I used to sweep up all the loose hay and straw from the local feed store about once a week.
no longer.
This is a game of Russian roulette where you lose.
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judgment: Unless you can verify that the field where the straw or hay is harvested has not been sprayed with a persistent herbicide in the last three years or so, you run the risk of losing a gardening year. . . or more!
There was a time when straw gardening was a good idea. That time has passed.
be safe.
what do you think?
How do you make sure your straw bales are safe? What experience have you had with straw gardening? Let us know in the comments!
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This is an updated version of an article originally published on May 6, 2016.
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