Bum
Information Number eight: This one
makes me shudder! Though to be perfectly honest, I've not heard any of
the myriad TV or print gardening experts encouraging this disastrous
practice. Yet it never fails...take a drive down almost any residential street
and you'll inevitably find a garden—ornamental or vegetable—covered in
several inches of plain old field hay straight from the bale.
Just down my own street, a
relatively attractive (this season) mixed perennial garden is on its way to
extinction next season. Why? because the four to six inches of field
hay mulch they recently applied is loaded with field hay seeds that, by
mid- to late-spring next year will have sprouted and responded vigorously
to an early-season application of fertilizer...and will, without a shadow of
doubt, totally overwhelm every desirable perennial the gardener worked so hard
to plant and nurture.
Worse, many of those
field-weed seeds are from highly aggressive plants that, once rooted,
will take nothing short of backhoes or gallons of herbicide sprays to control,
remove or kill.
While they, too, may contain
a few seeds here and there, oat, wheat, rice or barley straw is a much wiser
choice than weed-seed-infested field hay. Unless, of course, you think it'd be
fun to spend half your summer on hands and knees trying to rip out
endless sprouts, roots and tangles of unbelievably aggressive noxious weeds.
