Mulching your GARDEN for beginners | Using Straw as mulch

[Music] if you've been listening to the podcast you know that we are doing a soil series which is mulch compost and soil and i wanted to break down the mulch just a little bit better for you so we're gonna do a little series on youtube and i'm gonna break down each individual mulch for you that we use the most common ones and today we're gonna be talking about straw mulch it's a good day well it's kind of a sad day because i gotta get rid of my couch garden my garden couch see straw couch it's pretty sweet isn't it so here's the deal with straw mulch straw is awesome it is the most it is the most how do we say it i guess i would say visually appealing in the garden i feel like and it's one of the most functional but it doesn't have it's cost prohibitive sometimes but there's key components that help make it a great mulch so when we buy this bale here of straw it comes in pretty you know pretty large pieces if we come down here to where it fell off you can see these are large pieces that's where this bad boy comes in it's a little bit more difficult than you would think it's not like when you do leaves and then they just get mowed and sucked up they actually fall on the ground so then we gotta rake them up but it's all good we're gonna make some mulch real quick check this out use the lawnmower to chop up the straw you need to have a mulching blade on it because what that does is it cuts it up real finely and it doesn't shoot it out the side just drops it but as you probably saw the lawn mower the mulch doesn't really suck up as good you get a little bit in the bag but not as much so now we gotta rake [Music] but that's done let's talk about why we cut it up so you can totally use get a bale of straw not hay you have to get straw because hay will have the seeds and then that's what we'll plant into your garden and you'll just end up growing hay so if you get a bale of straw you can totally use this size like just as it comes out not an issue in fact i use that over here in my strawberry beds which we'll go look at in a second but for my gardens i like to chop it up because then as it sits over the winter time it'll start to compost and then it'll feed my garden even more and i mean a lot of people use it for you know weed suppression and stuff like that but what i really use it for is the simple fact of putting organic matter back into my soil so that i can keep it nice and fluffy and airy and get the nutrients to go around and as this stuff breaks down it will attract worms and then they will do their job in there too so it's a win-win situation weed suppression cools the soil in the summer keeps it warm in the winter i know magic right it cools and warms shocker and then it attracts worms which in fact then kind of fertilizes even more so it's kind of like letting your garden do the work for you so you do a little bit of work now and then throughout the season it'll continue to work for you and that's a plus again the one issue is that the mulch is a little bit cost prohibitive it's not too bad um straw for example this bale cost us six bucks which isn't bad but you know when we were talking on the podcast and i'll put a link in the description to that episode batavia brought up that a bale of hay at her house excuse me a bale of straw is about i think she said like 60 bucks or something crazy like that but she lives in a big city so that could be cost prohibitive but even then it doesn't matter we can still make mulch it's not a big deal it's just maybe you can't use the straw but it is what it is the bale of straw comes in little blocks and that's what you can take off in order to make it a little bit more manageable instead of just dumping a whole bale out there so just take little blocks and do it as you need it and keep it nice and short and easy i get my straw cut up and i go to lay i like to put a two to three inch layer across my whole bed so i have four eight by four uh beds in what i call the main part of my garden and about half of a bale will cover those beds so it's not too bad about half a bale don't quote me on that but pretty close so that's not too bad and that's with chopping up if you don't chop it up then it's not that big a deal you can get it'll probably spread more but the problem i have with it is because it's so long that it can kind of leave gaps so you have to really lay it on thick and then that can let the light in and let the reeds weeds go through so you want really both of them to kind of you want both of the benefits to come out of using this mulch but here we just laid down the mulch and it's all straw all of it so you can see that we have right around two inches here and around the base of the plants you want to kind of leave them a little gap around them so i have to go back through and clean all these out just a little bit you know nothing major now this one i actually did the other day and what happened was i used some of the compost i was making was making leaf mulch and when i put it out of my compost pile i had some not not a whole lot but a little bit of raw chicken manure and being that it's winter it's okay to put a little bit in because it will continue to break down but i wanted to dilute it a little bit so i just came through and put a light sprinkling of the straw on this one too and when all of this gets clear all these parsnips come up which i need to pull them up soon then i will go through and lay the mulch down there as well because remember if you're if your soil is not happy your garden's not happy and if your garden's not happy then that means that you're not going to be happy with what you get out of it so make let's make sure we amend our soil and put a lot of that organic matter back in if you're anything like me and you watch the video and you're like where when do i put the mulch down what do i do well i'm here to tell you that fall in my opinion is the best time to put it down because it gives it time to decompose over the winter and create that little bit of compost layer on top and start to feed that soil but if you can't get it down there in the fall or it's too late in this season now don't worry you can still put it down in the spring and a lot of times what i will do is i'll refresh it in the spring as well so i haven't used mulch in my garden here until this year i've only been in this garden for three years now but my last garden that i had for eight years i would use mulch sporadically whenever i used a mulch i realized that i had better results so now we have a method that we have to collect stuff for mulch and use it and be more cost effective and if you put it down into the spring you can refresh the top layer of it and that will one make it look better but two it will also give another layer of protection against the weeds all you have to do is just move around it a little bit just to plant your stuff in the ground you know if you're if you're sewing seeds just create a little row and make that space because the mulch will help with the erosion too so when the wind blows or the snow melts or the rains come it's a barrier against it and it'll help with that and it also helps with frost heaving in the winter time so when you get those days that are like freezing cold and it warms up freezing cold stuff can actually get lifted out of the ground and this will help with that it'll help minimize the temperature change so stuff doesn't actually get frost heave is bad and that really typically applies to your garlic and your onions a lot of people say they got frosty because they didn't plant them deep enough when in fact that may be part of it but if you put that layer of mulch on top then it would eliminate that as well so it's kind of a benefit of the two get out make some mulch put it in your garden we're going to be talking about leaves and wood chips as well so don't worry we got you covered all the way around but i wanted to put it in specific videos so you guys could kind of pick what you wanted and go that way but um hit us up on all our social media platforms leave a comment and tell us what kind of mulch you're using in your garden down below and check out the backyard gardens podcast new episodes weekly every thursday until next time we'll catch you guys [Music] later

Channel: Sandy Bottom Homestead

Views: 42,334

Keywords: using straw as mulch, using straw as mulch in vegetable garden, straw as mulch in the garden, using straw as mulch in garden, mulching your garden with straw, how to use straw mulch, straw mulch vegetable garden, straw as mulch, using straw in the garden, mulching with straw, straw mulch garden, straw mulch, use straw in garden, why use straw in garden, straw mulch raised bed, Mulching your garden for beginners, garden mulch, sandy bottom homestead

Id: xHyA9vfbyHg

Length: 9min 23sec (563 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 19 2020