we're going to be talking about

using grass and hay as a mulch to grow food.

(hay thumps)

(gentle music)

For the past three years,

we've been using a lot more cut grass and hay

in our vegetable garden to help us with growing food.

Now the thing about grass, especially where we are,

where it's quite a wet climate,

we just get so much of it.

So, it's almost like autumn time,

we have all the autumnal leaves.

It's like the rest of the time,

when it's not winter, you have so much grass.

And the thing is,

if you've got an abundance of a particular resource,

than it makes complete sense to make the most of it

and utilise it to help you out

with what you're trying to do.

So, that's exactly what we're doing through using grass.

So, if you live in suburbia, than the likelihood is

that there's gonna be a lot of people mowing their lawns.

So, all you need to do is ask them for their law clippings.

And even just volunteer to pick them up yourself.

Because they are such an abundant resource around there.

And the thing is you can get them for free.

And when it comes to mulching,

what you wanna do is place a two inch

or a five to six centimetre layer.

You can make the layer thicker

but that's kind of a good minimum to aim for.

On our small holding,

we do have a lot of land.

So, that means a lot of grass.

So, at the moment,

we're currently scything our orchard

and that's gonna create so much hay for us.

Now, there is something about hay

which people like to bring up a lot.

And I saw it in a few comments,

in the growing the potatoes the lazy way.

Where we simply placed potatoes on the ground

and just covered it with a thick layer of hay.

And people saying that you're basically

just putting down grass seed.

And that is true.

We have a wildflower hay meadow.

And when we have hay, we like to cut it,

after all the wildflowers have seeded.

And in that case, there is quite a lot of seed.

But the idea behind mulch

and going towards no dig garden system

is that you're just going to

continue piling it on over the year.

Yes, hay can give you a lot of weeds

and it can give you a lot of grass to deal with.

But that's basically only

if you take the hay off to leave bare soil

and then all the grass will grow through.

Because the idea, with adopting a mulch system,

is that over the year,

you're going to continue placing some more layers of mulch.

And especially for something quite dense, such as hay.

Especially after it's rained.

It's literally going to smother the ground.

So, the weeds will find it very difficult to go through.

And should any weeds happen to come through,

then it's so easy to pull out by hand.

Or you can simply place another thick layer over the top.

And gradually, as you build the layers,

the hay at the bottom,

is going to start to break down.

And it's going to release those nutrients.

And as an interesting discussion,

where you're looking at,

should I mulch with straw?

Or should I mulch with hay?

And yeah, straw has its benefits

because you might not get weeds

because they've already taken the wheat off it.

But the thing about hay is

that usually, especially from a wildflower hay meadow,

or organically farmed meadow,

there's other things growing,

apart from grass, such as clover.

So, there actually tends to be more nutrients in hay.

So, if you want fertile soil,

then what I'd recommend you do is mulch with hay.

And I can speak from experience

because this is the third year now where we're using hay.

And we haven't seen any noticeable differences in weeds.

In fact, by mulching more, we are building more soil.

And we're also weeding less.

So, it's actually saving time.

And if you happen to have a lot of hay

and you want to create a new area of garden,

then here's a great way to create a noted garden.

All you need to do is take off

the top two to three inches,

so around six to seven centimetres of soil,

and you place a really thick layer of hay on top.

And then, with the soil that you've taken off,

you put that back onto the hay.

And then, over time, this will break down

and then you can plant into this.

And then, as the plants grow,

then mulch around them with hay.

And if you live in dry climate,

then mulching is a fantastic way

to reduce the need to water.

But it acts as insulation

where it retains moisture within the soil.

So, that's a really good benefit to it.

One thing we did to demonstrate

the effectiveness of growing in hay bales,

was that we kind of copied the straw bale garden idea.

We planted directly into hay bales

and we found two things.

We found if you left a hay bale out

for a whole grain season,

and then planted the next season,

this would be the most effective thing to do.

And the second thing is,

we didn't have to weed the squash plants once.

It was so simple.

It was putting out a bale of hay,

leaving it there for a year,

and then the following grain season,

putting in a bit of compost,

planting the plant, and then leaving it.

And all we had to do was harvest it at the end of the year.

And that's a prime example

that you can easily grow a lot of food

for hardly enough effort at all.

I hope this video has inspired you a bit

and answered your other questions

to do with growing food using grass and hay as a mulch.

And I do appreciate that some of you

may not have enough access to these materials.

So, a bit later on in the year,

I'm going to go out to my local community

and my local town,

and I'm going to show you

all kind of different materials

that you can collect from shops and businesses

which you can use as a mulch instead.

And if you have any further questions or comments,

regarding grain food and mulch,

then don't hesitate to ask me,

down below in the comments section.

And I look forward to seeing you again soon, good bye.

(gentle music)