I usually don't use hay for mulch but put it in my flower bed. Now I have these strange looking weeds and I think it came from the hay. Since I got a bad case of chiggers and just stopped the intense itching I'm not about to touh the weeds. So guess the weeds will spread .Already smothering my monarch bush aka Silkweed so will have to do something soon,maybe hubby will since he isn't affected as much .I must be allergic to those bugs. I like to use wood shaving when they power company trimming trees off power lines would dump them here if we ask but that was years ago.
Thanks Yvonne I knew better but did it anyway. Down here we don't have straw except pine straw and that kills worms, or what I heard not sure. I was surprised we couldn't find it when we moved here 24 years ago,Guess they don't sell enough to transport.
Yeah, hay usually has seeds, and some straw does too, although I would think you'd be able to get straw that doesn't. When I lived in Fayetteville, North Carolina, the grounds of the apartment complex were covered with pine straw, and that seemed to be a pretty good idea. Too expensive for me, though.
Since I don't have a pickup truck anymore, everything has to be transported in a car, so I bought some straw bales from the Tractor Supply Company store, because they were small bales, but I found that they were loaded with seeds.
We have pine trees and I have used the pine straw for mulch. I think that our feed store sells straw; but it has been several years since I bought any. We usually use leaves in the fall and mulch with those. I have not heard of pine straw killing worms, we seem to have them in the garden. Also, if you buy a bag of alfalfa pellets and spread them around on the ground by your plants, they make great fertilizer, and will slowly swell up and decompose and work their way into the ground. You can also put some in the planting hole when you are planting something like a rosebush, and when you fill the hole with water, the alfalfa pellets will swell up and then help to feed the rose.
Many years ago when I had the larger Garden I used salt hay (salt marsh hay) is weed seed free. Here are some of the advantages from the internet. advantages in your garden: It resists rotting. It doesn't pack down and smother plants. It is slower to break down than straw, so it will remain a good, in-take mulch for many months. It is weed seed free. Salt marsh hay requires the saltwater tidal changes to germinate and grow, and your garden isn't a salt marsh.
Pine straw is a good alternative to regular straw in the South but it doesn't have the insulating value of regular straw. @Marie Mallery said, I could find regular straw at the feed store when I lived in south Georgia. I can't believe it cannot be found in north Florida. South Florida would be a different matter. I did have trouble sometimes using alfalfa pellets as mulch, though. If your soil bacteria is active, sometimes the alfalfa pellets will compost so fast the plants will burn at the base. Just be careful, as I lost a whole lot of rabbiteye blueberries once using alfalfa to mulch them.
I was not actually using the alfalfa pellets as a mulch, @Don Alaska . I agree that would be too strong and could burn the plant. Sometimes, I put the pellets in a bucket and add water so that they will swell up before I use them; but usually I just take the bucket of dry pellets (hopefully just before we have rain), and I just walk around and toss handfuls at the plants as I go by. I have never had it burn anything using only light sprinkles like this. It will help a compost pile to ferment, too, and I have used some when I thought that the compost needed some help and heat to decompose better. It was fine if it heated up then, because it helped the whole compost pile to start fermenting better. I have also used beet or pea pellets in the same way. When I had horses, I always got the beet pulp for them. You have to soak it overnight, and then mix in their grain, and it sometimes takes the horses a while to get used to the beet pulp. Once they start to like it, it makes a good feed supplement because it doesn’t fire them up like oats will do, but it helps them to put on weight, and have a shiny coat.
The county made us cut our beautiful little pine forrest we had here becuse they said pine beetles were found in the area. They said if a pine beetle is found on our property we'd be charged TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS a tree!!So we sold them to a pump wooder.
Everybody up here grows lawns, and cuts them and waters them and cuts them and fertilizes them and cuts them.... Lots of folks take bags of clippings to a plant based 'dump' in town. Also any other compostable garden waste. We dump in a pile on our property. We also bag leaves in the fall and add them to this huge pile that we have been building for years. Now we go to the back for glorious mulch. At the farm we have lots of organic choices. We used 'bad' hay for the potatoes. Don't need so much dirt, then, if you keep it wet. And grass clippings piled thick to kill weeds.
Another way to deal with alfalfa pellets is to ferment them in the bucket and water the plants with the "alfalfa tea". It is a good source of nutrients, especially nitrogen. We never had horses, but we fed our goats beet pellets and they ate them just fine. I also grew mangels (forage beets) for both the poultry and the goats and sheep. Forage turnips also.