Backyard Straw Bale Mulch and Composting Projects

Straw bale mulch is one of my favorite materials for sheet mulching and building compost heaps. Depending on where you live or where your project site is located, this resource might be very scare and expensive to procure, or it may be so ubiquitous that infinite supply is available forever either cheap or totally free. I've worked under both such circumstances.

On one site, there were several horses who were fed hay, which is a different but related product, though their fenced area was littered with straw which had the effects of mitigating mud and absorbing some of their waste products for more manageable harvesting and composting. It was nice to have an endless supply of nutrient rich, fast-composting materials to build thermophilic compost heaps with.

However I'd want to use only straw with no hay mixed in as there tends to be far less viable seeds in the straw which can themselves become weeds in the garden.

Unfortunately it seems like most straw and hay bales are sourced from farms that practice so-called conventional agriculture whereby the crops are sprayed with any number of toxic pesticide and herbicide chemicals. I've had the sad experience of hoping that such chemicals had leached out fully over time or been broken down by composting, only to find a very poor germination rate and stunted growth of seedlings direct sewn into beds mulched with the straw.

I have noticed that well established nursery seedlings seem to have matured enough and passed the stage of greatest vulnerability to the lethal toxins so that they can do just fine despite any residues. I wish this wasn't the world we live in, but you live and learn. I'm very hesitant to do any straw mulching now because it's hard to know if you can trust the source. However I've found that the best properties of the straw bale mulch can be derived from other sources.

Mainly, it's the very light and loose layering of the material that I like because direct sewn seeds can easily work their way up and through to reach the sun. Most other readily available sheet mulching materials are relatively heavy and chunky and end up making it difficult for seedlings to break through before they die trying. I've turned over many a section of such mulch to find I'd made the mistake of having a little too thick of mulch. Of course, it's possible to simply use a very fine compost mix to cover the seeds, however it doesn't have the same effect as mulch in that it allows for the force of rain drops and overhead irrigation to be broken and for the water to gently percolate into the soil without disturbing the seedlings.

Thus, it's a fine line and I've gotten the best results where there is a perfect balance of light and loose mulch. Substitutes for straw bale mulch that have worked very well for me when they were available where materials such as bamboo leaves, arundo donax leaves, and pretty much any other very light, thin, or fine dried leafy materials in bulk. At one site I found a virtual hillside of discarded shredded palm tree leaves, that was a gold mine!

In the photos shown here, I was able to procure straw bales from a friend who had just had a rustic farm themed backyard party at he and his wife's posh West Los Angeles home. It was a great opportunity for us to reconnect and for me to exemplify the permaculture ethos by making a community building event out of scavenging one person's trash, saving them on the disposal cost, rescuing the materials from a landfill, and making it another person’s treasure. I have to acknowledge as well that this "coincidence of wants" was facilitated by social media. He wouldn't have known I was looking for a source of straw bales had I not made a post. He just so happened to have an excess the resource and it was a perfect match.

I'm grateful for all of the community based online platforms that facilitate connecting all of the charitable in-kind donors, declutterers, movers, demolishers, etc. with all of us hungry scavenging upcycling maniacs always ready for the next "curb-alert". If only we had the industrial warehouse yard space we'd scoop it all up, organize it meticulously and make the ultimate salvage depots in every community on the planet...Someday...