Hey there, I have a question for you. Are you starting something new this year? Maybe something in your garden that's a little bit outside of your norm. Or maybe you're starting a garden for the very first time and that in itself is outside of your norm. If so, you're not alone. I'm starting a few new ventures in my garden this year, but none is

quite as different as what we're going to be talking about today. Strawbill gardening, but it

almost didn't happen. Let me give you a little bit of a backstory. As I was thinking about my garden

this year, I was thinking about some of the persistent challenges

that I have in one particular area, well, actually two technically.

Number one, I seem to always battle early blight on my tomato plants, which is pretty indicative

of our wet springs.

It's a fungal disease that exists in the soil. And I found

that it seems to be worse on my tomato plants whenever I mulch with wood chips. Now, I'm a huge fan of

wood chip mulch. I mulch everything in my garden with wood chip mulch. But I observed that the years

that I mulched my tomato plants with hay and my potato plants,

they also suffer from early blight sometimes, I noticed that the blight wasn't nearly as bad.

So last year I decided I was going to mulch my potatoes and my tomato plants with hay

and see if it continues to get better compared to mulching with

wood chips. But then that turned out to be a terrible mistake because the hay that I bought,

unbeknownst to me, had been poisoned with herbicide. Now I know that that's pretty common,

so if you're thinking about mulching with hay, just be careful.

Make sure that I would recommend organic hay to be honest with you because my tomato plants and

potato plants, they curled all funny and gnarly. I ended up taking off my hay within two weeks,

but still those plants were stunted for the rest of the season. So that's a subject for another

day.

But I still couldn't get off the fact that that hay in past years, when the hay hadn't been poisoned,

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