What's going on everyone? So today we are talking about how to use straw as mulch in your garden and this is pretty timely for me because I'm installing a new terraced garden in my friend's front yard. So he has a hilly lot that we've had to terrace.

It's a corner lot.

And we need to make sure that we have really good water retention because it gets a ton of sun.

Again, I live in zone 10b down here in San Diego.

So we've been turning to straw, or at least I've been investigating using straw as a mulch.

And the first thing that I found out

is that you have to make sure that you are actually

using straw and not hay.

So hay is, so straw is the stalk or stem of grains like wheat, barley, oats. Hay is grass or

legumes that have been cut and dried. And most of the time hay is used as animal feed.

Now the reason that hay is so bad is because it has protein-rich seed heads in it.

That's the top of the plant is included in hay hay which means that if you throw that all over your

garden you're effectively just spreading seed of plants that you don't want to grow all across

your garden which is just something that is a complete counter to exactly what you

want to use this mulch for, to keep weed seeds down, to keep moisture in.

And so straw, on the other hand, is the bottom half of the hay stocks. It

contains almost no seeds whatsoever. It doesn't have any protein. It's pure carbon. And straw is relatively

lightweight. The stocks themselves are hollow. They don't mat or

compact. So you don't have any aeration problems there. And they're also relatively

slow to decompose. So they make really good mulch and I'm

actually going to consider combining them with used coffee grounds that I'm

getting from a local coffee shop. So I'm going to do a mix of straw and use coffee grounds as my mulch in this terraced garden.

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