You are undoubtedly familiar with the practice of using hay for mulching vegetables and other plants. But do you know that hay will prepare a garden or any area for planting?
Hay can transform a piece of weedy field and turf into an area rich and ready for growing things without a struggle or even a gesture on your part in the way of digging—and all between now and spring.
Suppose you have a yen to naturalize wildflowers at the wilderness edges of your place or through your meadow, but at present, the area is thick with weeds, field grass, and heavy turf.
The very thought of plunging a spade into this fills you with dismay—it would bounce back at you. A tractor-drawn disc harrow is about all that would penetrate it.
With hay, it is a cinch and reasonably effortless to prepare an area for planting. Regardless of what you plan to grow, the whole procedure is unbelievably simple, effective, and inevitably sure.
Shape and Size
First, you decide the shape and size of the area you want to plant next spring. This month or earlier —and the sooner, the better—pile hay 2’ feet deep in that area. No matter how tough its fiber, the grass beneath, when deprived of air and light, soon dies.
When something is piled on the lawn, a brown spot develops beneath in about a week or ten days.
So it is easy to understand how the grass under a deep hay mulch could completely disintegrate in eight months. Then, having piled on the hay, you just forget the whole thing until spring planting time.
Remove Hay
When you remove the hay, the area will be grass-free and ready to work. Dead and rotting roots under the soil surface are preparing to fertilize your new planting, be it a coreopsis, a peach tree, a blueberry bush, or a vegetable garden.
The soft earth responds to a spade, trowel, or fork. It is usually not necessary to do a digging job purely plant. However, depending on what you are planting, you conceivably may want to remove the roots encountered.
In any event, run the spade around the edge of the area to sever live roots of the surrounding sod to prevent encroaching grass. Grasses vary in toughness; some take longer to rot.
How Does One Come by Hay?
There are many possibilities. If you live near a parkway or in a semirural area where the edges of the road are mowed, the workmen are usually delighted to deliver the raked piles to your garden—it saves them carting them to the dump.
Do you have a meadow that is cut annually? Or do you know anyone who has? Just ordinary meadow grass is fine for this purpose. And, of course, you can buy “spoiled hay.”
There is nothing sloppy or unattractive about spoiled hay. It has merely been caught in a shower at such a time that it cannot be fed to livestock.
Farmers bale it for organic gardeners to use as mulch. It costs 75d a bale delivered in our vicinity (Connecticut)—65d if we go and get it. Three bales will prepare an area of 15 by 15 feet for planting.
Take the bale apart and fluff up the hay as you spread it. Spoiled hay is as dry and pleasant to handle as the fresh cut.
Process of Decomposition
After you have laid it thick on your area, bacterial action commences. Another aspect of this plan is the composting that goes on under the hay.
Some of the hay itself decomposes and helps enrich the soil for the new planting. Earthworms will presently gather and aid in transforming both grassroots and hay into organic matter.
The process of decomposition of organic matter uses nitrogen. I find that an organic nitrogen supplement is helpful and speeds things up. Dried blood, tankage, and poultry manure are all rich in nitrogen.
Cottonseed meal is also a fine source. Nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium are usually plentiful in all compost material, but since nitrogen is more rapidly used up, the addition of some is helpful.
A sprinkling of lime over the earth before you put hay on is not a must but does help the decomposition process.
Prepare A Place For Planting
You can prepare a place for planting and achieve the same end with compost topped with hay.
Before the hay goes on (and you’ll need much less), spread the area you wish to make ready with layers of grass clippings, old dead weeds, or any organic matter you would put in the compost pile. Thus, you build a compost pile on the place you are preparing for planting.
Then neatly cover it with a layer of hay— topsoil will do if you have no hay. You may also simply leave the compost visible if it is where it will not look too messy.
Add the same nitrogen and lime in the layers of compost as you arrange it.
The Advantage of Using Compost
The advantage of using compost this way is that it enriches the soil on which it lies all winter.
The disadvantage is that it may be awkward to remove in the spring, for it probably won’t be thoroughly decomposed.
Hay is more easily removed and may be used elsewhere as mulch —at least that part that has not rotted. Compost will be well decomposed if this program is started two years before planting.
If hay is impossible to acquire in your neighborhood, you can use grass clippings, corn stalks, straw, leaves, pine needles, or just plain weeds, piling them on thick where you want to prepare for planting.
Salt hay is all right, but since it won’t rot, it doesn’t contribute the same food value as fresh-cut hay or other organic materials.
Hay is Best
If you can get it, hay is best. It is usually easy to come by, clean to work with, and neat in appearance. Decomposition takes place under your hay all winter.
Come spring, when the snow melts away, and the land dries up a bit, you take away the hay, and there is the miracle of fresh new black earth just waiting for Japanese iris, naturalized red field poppies, the growing of your summer dinners, auratum lilies or strawberry plants.
I must say I like this indirect approach to digging up a new area for planting—and what could be simpler?
44659 by Jean Hersey