If there is a way to do this, I bet Larry will know. I'm not mechanically-inclined, and about the most advanced mechanical thing I do is start the lawn mower, leaf vac or Mantis cultivator, but I do spend a lot of time collecting and chopping up/shredding mulching materials, and for the most part I only use chopped/shredded autumn leaves, grass clippings and old hay no longer fit to feed to animals.

I am having a hard time figuring out how you feed the straw into a modified lawn mower to begin with? When I am chopping up hay, grass or leaves with the mower, they are already spread out on the ground and I either push or drive the mower over them, depending on whether I'm using the push mower or riding mower. So, how does your straw arrive? Loose? In bales? Clean? Or, straight from barns or stables and mixed with urine/manure?

I use old, spoiled hay more than straw, since that is what is available free in my neck of the woods from time to time, and I normally just break apart the square bales into flakes by hand and place the flakes in a wheelbarrow, push it into the garden and line up the flakes in rows on beds or pathways.

With leaves and grasses, we run over them with either the push mower or the riding mower and chop everything up into pretty small pieces, catching it in the grass catcher. The push mower has a small grass catcher, so I empty the mixture of chopped grass/autumn leaves into the wheelbarrow and fill it up, and then push it into the garden to dump the finely chopped/shredded organic matter onto the ground. With the riding mower, we have a big triple grass catcher that looks like three large, rectangular trash cans lined up in a row side by side behind the mower. When they are full, we drive the mower to the garden and carry each container into the garden to dump its contents on the ground by hand.

Long before we bought the riding mower and its awesome grass catcher, I would use the leaf vacuum to shred/pick up hay, straw, autumn leaves and grass clippings (always wear a mask so you aren't inhaling all the dust and tiny pieces of plant debris) and then I'd dump the bag of tiny pieces of organic matter onto the ground in the garden.

All of the above work, but are fairly labor-intensive since I still am spreading stuff by hand. My garden is not as large as yours by any means, so I can do that labor-intensive stuff. If I had a garden as big as yours, I'd have to find a better way to spread it or I'd never get it all done.

Chopping up the straw into smaller pieces that are easier to handle would be my preferred method, but when you chop it up into small pieces it does decompose a lot more quickly. It also can blow away. I sort of get around that by adding new layers constantly. New layers of grass clippings get added on top of the existing mulch all summer long, and the moisture in the grass usually helps it pack down so it doesn't blow around too much. Having those chopped/shredded pieces is great if you are making compost, but not as wonderful if you want for your straw to be a season-long mulch to suppress weeds during the growing season. If your garden is exposed to wind, the smaller pieces would blow away as well, which is why I like to put whole hay flakes on the ground. They stay intact and don't blow around. And, for anyone reading this who is asking 'what the heck is a hay flake?', that's what I call flat sections of square (really, they are rectangular but everyone here calls them square bales) hay bales that I pull off the short edges of the bales. It is sort of like taking saltine crackers out of a package one after another with each hay flake being a cracker. I normally pull off flakes that are 2 to 4" thick. Flakes that size are thick enough to keep the ground cool and moist and heavy enough that they don't blow around.

Johnny, how about one of those manure spreaders that you pull behind a tractor? I've never used one, so am not sure what size pieces of straw you could spread with one, but that's one of the few things I can think of that you use to spread something on the ground....other than sprayers (and your straw isn't liquid) or drop spreaders (and your straw isn't granular). I know from experience that when you spread loose hay or straw, it is very important to wet it down or to walk over it or drive over it to pack it down so a good spring wind doesn't blow it all to one side of the garden.

What I can picture that seems like it might be ideal is something like one of those big chipper/shredder trucks that tree-cutting services use to chop up trees and brush into mulch. I can picture straw being pulverized in one of those. I am sure there's a chute that dumps out the finished mulch, but not sure if you could keep the pulverized straw from blowing away once it was dumped. (And, if you aren't familiar with wood chip mulch gardening, Google and read about this method using the words "Back to Eden".) If I had a choice of wood chips or straw, I'd choose wood because it breaks down into awesome, humusy soil. We have friends who have long allowed a tree-cutting company to park its trucks on their property at night when they are in our area. This is a traveling company not based, as far as I know, in southern OK, so the employees come through once or twice and year and work for a couple of weeks before moving on to their next job. Usually this tree-cutting company is doing contract work to keep trees and brush cut back from utility right-of-way areas. In return for being allowed to park there, the company dumps piles of chopped and shredded trees/brush on the property, where the residents spread it and use it as mulch.

One of my favorite mulches of all time is those big, round hay bales that still are intact enough that you basically unroll them on the ground in big sheets of hay, instead of in the flakes you pull off a square bale. Often though, by the time someone gives me old, spoiled round bales of hay, they often are practically compost already so I can break them apart easily with a pitchfork, hay fork or manure fork, which is a good thing as I don't have a tractor or hay bay unroller.

I don't suppose your straw is coming in big round bales, is it? If it is, and assuming you have a tractor with a standard three-point hitch (or a ranching friend who has this equipment and who would come do this for you), then the bales of straw could be unrolled using a hay bale unroller. Have you seen anyone use one of these? It is pretty cool. Most folks I know that have horses or cows here in my area don't have them and don't use them, choosing instead to just set the gigantic, round hay bales in the field and leave it to the livestock to pull the bales apart as they eat. I'll find and link a document below that talks about the use of hay bale unrollers. They're your best answer, as far as I know, but only if your straw arrives baled into round bales.

And, if it is used straw, like you'd get from a stable or something similar, then I think the manure spreader might be ideal if it can spread something as large as straw.

We have friends who lived/ranched just a mile or two from us back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and they used to take old hay and run it through a big chipper/shredder and spread it on the ground, but I never saw them spread it, so I am not sure if he had something he pulled behind the tractor to spread it or if he loaded it onto the pickup truck or trailer and then had to have someone stand there and toss it off the truck or trailer and onto the ground. He did have a manure spreader, though, so maybe that is how he spread the old, spoiled hay after running it through the chipper/shredder. After we'd lived here a few years, they started bringing me their old hay bales to use as garden mulch, so I think they decided it wasn't worth their time to shred it and spread it in the hay pastures. My best guess it that it was too labor-intensive to shred it and spread it, or they were just extraordinarily kind and decided I needed the hay for mulch more than they needed to spread it on their hay pastures.

So, that's what has worked for me on a small scale, but I don't think my methods translate well to a huge farm-sized garden unless you have a of children helping you (cheap labor).

So, I did find a document about using hay bale unrollers to mulch rows of agricultural crops and I linked it below. If I had a garden as large as yours, this would be my preferred growing/mulching technique. Note in the photo that sheet plastic (polypropylene and polyethylene both are used in agriculture) is used to cover the actual growing rows, and then they spread the hay between rows. One drawback to this technique is that you have to space your rows far enough apart that a tractor can drive between the rows or over a row without the tires crushing the next closest row, but using a hay bale unroller to mulch would be the most mechanical/least labor-intensive method that I can imagine. In the linked document, they describe how you have to modify the unroller to an offset position in order to unroll the bales between rows. One disadvantage to using plastic mulch as shown in the linked document is that it eventually breaks down into pieces that end up in your soil, but there are some newer, biodegradable mulches available that break down into harmless materials in growing fields. I don't know if they are cost-effective though.

Here is a link that might be useful: Hay Bale Unrollers

Dawn,

Thanks for the ideas. This is more what I was imagining, but smaller.
http://www.rowmulchers.com

Johnny

Here is a link that might be useful: Mulch distributor

What are you trying to accomplish with blowing straw johnny? Getting into a area you can't otherwise or more even distribution or cover a huge area or what?

I use straw as mulch in my garden and just bust up flakes by hand- but then I only go through 2-4 bales worth at a time to mulch in my garden. I wouldn't bother with a blower for that. I also rake up and move glass clippings and leaves without machinery too- again, because I'm usually only doing 4-8 barrows at a time, and I don't bother with a machine for it.

But if I had a much bigger garden to mulch I probably would think about using machinery for it.

Johnny, Oh, those are so cool!!!! I had no idea that anyone actually made such a piece of equipment. Wouldn't it be nice if one of the rental yards that rent out equipment like Bobcats and tillers had the compact ones to rent to folks with very large gardens or small farms?

I bet a person who is really mechanically inclined could build their own sort of spreader to pull behind a tractor, but I cannot picture what it would take to get the part built that would drop or shoot out the straw to cover the ground. That's why we need Larry and his inventive mind. Larry can build anything.

I keep thinking of a standard chipper-shredder like our friends used to chop up their old hay. You drop the stuff into the hopper and it comes out of the chute at the bottom. You could convert a simple trailer to a straw/compost spreader, but you'd have to have some mechanism inside of it to make your straw come out of the trailer and fall down onto the ground. Saying that is one thing, but making it happen probably is a lot more complicated than I think it would be.

Dawn

BeesNeeds,
We are in the process of creating a group of large gardens. Our mission is to improve the quality of food consumed by food bank recipients. Education is also one of our goals. We are convinced that food security should be normal for all, not just for the wealthy.

Dawn,
I hope someone in manufacturing will start to produce equipment for small holders. Big corporations are not producing wholesome food for regular customers. We have good organic food available only for those who can afford the extra cost. Just sad really.

Johnny

I bet you're thinking of salvaging a silage harvester. First thought I had was a snow blower. Maybe the industrial kind could be modified to avoid compaction, but just a regular old harvester ... Not sure. Curious to see what Larry thinks, too.

Bill's a mech genius. Never hesitate if you need any ideas or get stuck on a re engineered modification.

Bon,

That is one I hadn't thought of. Thanks.

Johnny

Johnny, Your comment about the need for someone in manufacturing to make equipment for small holders made a light bulb come on in my brain. Where in the USA do we have extremely successful small organic farms? The answer, of course, has to be Maine, where small organic farms that sell at market or as CSAs are really popular, and to learn about small organic farms, of course you'd only have to go to MOFGA's website, which I did.

People like me who are have gardened organically for a long time likely have shopped at Johnny's Selected Seed, which means we've been exposed to MOFGA and to the techniques used by leaders there in small organic farming, like Eliot Coleman. So, I've linked MOFGA's webpage below. There is a photo there of a person on a tractor flail chopping winter rye to use it as mulch. His machine sends the chopped rye flying through the air and into his trailer or farm wagon or whatever you'd call it. It made me think of your need for a way to blow straw directly onto your fields of crops.....so I linked it for you. The photo of the tractor and its flail chopping is midway down the linked page.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: MOFGA

Dawn,

Yet another possible solution. There are some very old flail mowers around. I have seen a couple for sale. Also, I may be in just the right hardiness zone to harvest cereal rye (winter rye) all winter. I'll think about this more over time. I have plans to grow A LOT of cereal rye next winter.

Johnny

Sorry, Folks. I have not been on the forum because of too many family medical problems.

Too build a spreader like you are talking about would depend on what kind of parts you have access to. To start from scratch and buy all of your parts would be very costly for something with low demand. A rider mower, small trailer and a pitch fork works well for my small gardens. If I have a large enough open area I just drive my pickup along the rows.

Larry

Larry,

That is a reasonable idea for a reasonable size garden. I was thinking ahead to when I'm trying to work with 10 acres.

Johnny

I don't know what kind of budget you are working with but if you could find one of those small home yard type wood chippers to pull along it might blow the straw where you want it to go. Of course you would have to have a wagon to pull the hay or straw along to feed the chipper. Also someone limber with lots of muscle to fork the hay/straw in to it.

Auther,
Good idea. I'll start looking.
Johnny

Here is a link that might be useful: Garden for the food bank

There are other methods of weed suppression that might be as useful or even more useful for raising crops on as large of a scale as you intend to do.

1. LIVING MULCH: Using a living mulch is one of them, but it isn't the only one. Growing clover as a living mulch in corn fields is one example of how a living mulch can be multipurpose. The clover suppresses weeds, it keeps the soil beneath it shaded and cooler, it shades or crowds out weeds that attempt to germinate and grow, and it fixes nitrogen that returns to the soil helping to replace the nitrogen that was used by the corn plants. When you use living mulch interplanted with crops, the drawback is that it can compete with the main crop for moisture, but you can work around that with spacing and careful selection of specific living mulch crops. Buckwheat is a great living mulch that goes from seed to flower in as little as 6 weeks. It sometimes is used by organic farmers as a living mulch in between rows of sweet potatoes. By the time the buckwheat is done, the sweet potato plants are running rampantly and can shade out their own weeds for the most part.

2. INTERCROPPING: Intercropping is another common technique. It is explained best in the wonderful book by John Jeavons "How To Grow More Vegetables...." (the title is long, I'll link it below). It is amazing how well some crops grow mixed together in an intercropping system and Mr. Jeavons and Ecology Action have worked out the best spacing over the decades. I use a lot of intercropping techniques in order to cram as many plants as possible into my garden beds, and the way it tends to work out is that I have very few weed issues. When you intercrop, you not only grow multiple crops in one space, but you also have the shorter crops serving, in essence, as a living mulch for the taller crops. One way that I have found works exceptionally well for me is to plant cool season crops (lettuce, radishes, beets, carrots, etc.) first and then to come back a month or two later after they are up and growing vigorously and plug-in larger warm-season crops from transplants---like tomato, squash, melon or pepper plants, for example. The warm-season crops benefit from the shorter, cool-season plants being well-established and shading the ground, preventing weeds from sprouting and growing. The cool-season crops benefit from the shading provided for them by the taller, fast-growing warm-season crops. This often allows the cool-season crops to continue producing a harvest later than they do when they aren't shaded. You use very careful spacing, and planting in specific (sort of hexagonal) patterns so that each of the plants, when it matures, is close enough to the next plant that their leaves barely touch. When they are grown that close to one another, they shade the ground beneath themselves pretty thoroughly which helps prevent weeds from thriving by shading them out. The first time I intercropped using one of John Jeavons' recommended planting combinations in the specific pattern he advocates, I was shocked at how well the plants grew in combination with one another and I was pleased with how well they outcompeted weeds or shaded out weeds. I'm not saying you won't have any weeds (that is just a dream) but they are greatly reduced and easy to hoe out or pull out.

In my garden, I sometimes use the exact plant combinations advocated in the book by John Jeavons, but I also have experimented and found combinations that work better for me here in the soil and climate that I have. One of my favorite combinations is to grow cool-season flowers, veggies and herbs like sweet alyssum, lettuce, carrots, borage, chamomile and snapdragons in beds where I'll eventually grow tomato plants. (I grow tons of tomatoes.) All of those grow and spread. Most are edible but others serve the purpose of attracting bees and pollinators while shading out cool-season weeds that tend to sprout all spring here. Chamomile is a great triple-use plant. It makes a terrific living mulch, but it is not so deep-rooted that it is difficult to yank out of the ground when it dies back in the heat of summer. I can clip off and gather its flowers and use them for chamomile tea (either to drink or to use when watering seedlings in flats to prevent damping off). It also attracts many beneficial insects and pollinators to the garden. By the time the chamomile is dying back, re-seeded Laura Bush petunias (bred from native petunias, so very heat-tolerant and drought-tolerant) are sprouting and covering the ground and taking over as the warm-season living mulch. I'm very fond of growing sweet peppers and hot peppers on the north side of indeterminate tomato plants in rows that run east-west. My farmer friends here in my neighborhood told me that my tomato plants would shade out my pepper plants or cause them to produce poorly, but I didn't have either of those issues. When the plants are younger, the pepper plants get all the sunlight they need. As the tomato plants grow rampantly in May and June, they get a lot larger and do shade the pepper plants, which helps prevent sunscald on the pepper fruit. I have found that both tomato and pepper plants produce very well when grown side by side in the same raised bed, so it is a combination I use every year and it has reduced pepper sunscald to a rarity in my garden. I like to grow cantaloupes and icebox watermelons on trellises as space-savers, but that leaves bare ground beneath them, and we know that weed seeds sprout in bare ground. To combat the weeds, I grow a dwarf okra (for many years it was Little Lucy, lately it has been Baby Bubba or something similar) on the south side of the trellis, which runs east-west. The shade from the okra prevents weeds from sprouting and growing and the shade from the trellis itself largely prevents weeds on the ground on the north side of the trellis, but I usually plant Laura Bush petunias there just to help shade the ground and keep it cool.

In the back garden which has a diffferent form of soil and which will be only in its third year of use as a garden in 2015, I use a lot of hot-season crops, with various varieties of southern peas (not just pink eye purple hull but crowder, zipper, lady and cream peas too) intercropped with other heat-lovers like cucumbers, melons, Armenian cukes, and winter squash. I try to keep most of the winter squash growing on the garden fences and grow southern peas in the soil at the base of the winter squash vines. It works fairly well, although in 2014 the voles that venture out of our 10 acres of woods to eat in the garden did develop a real fondness for the roots of southern pea plants, although they mostly ate the roots of Mackey and Colossus and left the Knuckle Purplehulls and Red Ripper varieties alone. When I lost the southern peas as ground covers, I just sowed seed of Armenian cucumbers and let them run rampant on the ground. I didn't really need any more Armenian cukes, so I'd harvest their fruit and feed them to the deer once the Armenian cukes were about the size of a baseball bat.

I've also experimented with living mulches in the summer heat. Sometimes the living mulch is an edible crop, but sometimes it is grown only to shade/cool the soil and to suppress weeds. One of my favorite combinations is to grow icebox watermelons (the vines are not as rampant and wide-ranging as those of full-sized watermelons) as a living mulch beneath widely-spaced okra plants or pepper plants. In 2014 I grew ornamental sweet potatoes as a living mulch beneath my pepper plants. Being very rampant growers, the ornamental sweet potatoes did have a tendency to try to climb the pepper plants every now and then, but I would just carry scissors with me while harvesting the peppers and would hack back the ornamental sweet potato vines at the same time I was picking peppers. I just dropped them into the pathways as I worked, and then I came back and raked up the vines and carried them out back to my compost pile. No, I wasn't silly enough to imagine they'd be allowed to compost. I knew the deer and bunnies would eat them (and they did) but at least the vines served yet another purpose---as feed for the wildlife.

I often grow nasturtiums (cool-season but often lasting until June before the heat burns them up, and surviving all summer in the cooler, wetter summers) and rat-tail radishes with my summer squash plants. The nasturtiums attract beneficial insects, produce edible flowes and shade the ground, the rat-tail radishes attract beneficial insects, produce edible seed pods (great raw or stir-fried) and shade the ground. The beneficial insects they attract serve as pollinators for the squash flowers or help control squash pests.

3. FALLOW FIELDS W/COVER CROPS. One of the best ways to suppress weeds is to fallow a field for an entire year, growing a cool-season cover crop on it in the fall/winter months and mowing that down and then either rototilling it into the soil (if you aren't using no-till farming) or using a drill to plant a warm-season cover crop right into the remains of the cool-season cover crop. After a year of cover-cropping, your weeds have been shaded out or crowded out, and then you spend the next year growing edible crops in that bed. This method requires keeping up to half your growing area fallow each year, but the cover crops are replenishing the soil when they decompose right there in the field, so you aren't just suppressing weeds---you are enriching your soil as well. I know that the Kerr Center for Sustainable Agriculture has done a lot of research in this area, and has a very specific cover crop/fallowing routine they follow both for weed suppression and to put organic matter back into the soil.

I do use hay, straw, chopped/shredded leaves and grass clippings in my garden as a mulch as well, particularly in the pathways between my raised beds, but find it challenging to gather/obtain enough mulch material to cover all the ground ever year. It also is labor-intensive to gather it and spread it, and you have to deal with the wind trying to blow it away. So, I find using intercropping and growing a living mulch help control weeds and improve soil and help suppress weeds in areas where I don't have enough hay mulch to go around. I haven't yet used fallowing a garden area very much, but did it last year with sorghum growing in my usual corn cage area and in one-quarter of my new back garden area. I don't really like fallowing a growing area. To me, even when the fallow field crops are meant to grow there, it looks messy and weedy. This year I am going to use amaranth in one area I am fallowing. I think it is prettier and it doesn't look as weedy to me as sorghum does. When you look at amaranth grown as a green manure or compost crop, it looks deliberate. To me, sorghum just looks like Johnson grass that has been allowed to invade and run wild. I hate Johnson grass.

Even winter wheat can be grown in winter as your cover crop, and as a bonus you can cut it down in spring and use it as home-grown mulch. Because of the garden-killing problems associated with persistent herbicide residues often found in hay and straw, I am trying to use mulching materials only produced on our own land. That's the only way I can be 100% sure that I am not using any sort of wheat straw or hay that was grown with the class of broad-leaf herbicides that can persist for several years in hay, straw, animal manure and compost at levels high enough to kill plants. It also is sustainable and more ecologically sound to use mulching materials produced on our land, but it is a lot more labor intensive to collect them and place them where I want them in the garden. Intercropping, fallowing and using living mulches helps keep all the bare soil covered. If there is one lesson I have learned (and I've learned it very well, unfortunately) since moving here and gardening on a much larger scale than I once did it is that you cannot leave one square inch of bare ground uncovered because if you do, Mother Nature will plant weeds there. I do everything I can to avoid having any bare ground in my garden areas. I still get weeds that sprout in mulch or beneath living mulch or beneath intercropped plants, but it is a small percentage of what I used to see. If I'd go no-till, I'd likely have even fewer weeds but I am addicted to working organic matter into my clay every fall and winter and it is a hard addiction to break. My newest garden area, which sits just north of our barn, is a no-till area where I built hay bale beds filled with hugelkultur materials. I'm not sure how I am going to like no-till gardening and the hugelkultur beds are scary because snakes love, love, love them, but I'm doing my best to make it work in that area. Maybe someday I'll expand the no-till techniques to the three other fenced-in garden areas, but it won't happen for a while yet.

It has taken me years of experimentation to find what works best for me but I have enjoyed every bit of it. All my friends and family are just in awe of how much food I produce in a relatively small garden. It isn't that my garden plots are small---any one of the 4 would be considered a large family garden, but rather just that I pack tons of plants into them and harvest a huge amount of food. This past year we ate all we could fresh, filled up two freezers, canned over 800 jars, and put a huge number of root crops and winter squash into storage. Intercropping plays a huge role in having such an abundant harvest because it lets me grow 2, 3 or 4 crops in the space formerly used for one. I am astonished at how well intercropping works. I admit I don't do everything John Jeavons advocates, particularly the double digging, but I use enough of his techniques to produce very large yields in relatively small spaces. I also didn't think I'd like living mulches because my dad and grandfather gardened differently---using hoes, rototillers or tractors to cultivate the soil between plant rows and keep it bare (so the fine soil dust from cultivation was their only mulch material). It took me a while to develop an affection for mulched beds and living mulch but now I consider them indispensible. I just kept trying one thing after another to figure out what worked here for me. From the time I bought my first edition of John Jeavons' book, to the time I bought the latest edition, about 20 years has gone by, and I garden completely differently now than I did then, and my garden now is so much better than it was when I grow single crops in long rows with bare soil in between the rows. I hope I always continue to experiment, to learn and find increasingly better ways to grow as organically and as sustainably as possible while still getting great yields.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: How To Grow More Vegetables.......

Dawn,
Thanks again. I have considered living mulch. However, my idea was to just plant right through it with my lister planter. It cuts an 8 in ditch about three inches deep then plants the seed about 1 1/2 inches deep in the center, of the bottom, of the ditch. I was looking at white dutch clover. The real problem is seed cost. It takes a lot of clover seed to plant an acre.
The clover has a shallow root system too. Another reason I considered it.

Here is a link that might be useful: Garden for the food bank

manure spreader with a directional chute

Manure spreader feeding into a snowblower