chuckwood
Addicted to ArboristSite
- Joined
- Jan 26, 2008
- Messages
- 8,681
- Reaction score
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- Location
- near the Great Smoky Mtns. Tennessee
Spreading mulch around in a garden is labor intensive, so I've cooked up a way to lay down hay mulch using round bales. I get these cheap via Craigslist, bales that have been sitting out in the weather and are spoiled and sold cheap for ten to 15 bucks a bale. I figured I could unroll these things in between rows, sorta like unrolling a roll of toilet paper. But there's a big problem, these bales are four feet wide, too unwieldy, as they are, I can only move them with a tractor. So I used a chainsaw to cut them in half, making them manageable. As things went along, I figured out how to unroll them as close as possible to my sugar snaps that are around 5 inches high right now, and how to get them to lay down an evenly sized mat of hay as I went along. I've used square bales as mulch previously, but it's time consuming, and the square bales puff up a lot as you spread them around. I prefer a dense, compact layer of hay or straw that will work better to keep moisture in and weeds from growing. So far, this has worked very well today. I got everything mulched in much less time it would have taken with the square bales. All I had to do was walk up and down my rows, unrolling the half bales. Sometimes the layer of hay would fizzle out and stop laying, and I'd just pull out another layer on the roll and it would continue laying down hay. This is the first time I've ever used a chainsaw for cutting hay bales. My first time cutting didn't work right, the baling twine got caught in my saw sprocket and spooled up in there making a big mess and stopping my saw. After that, I made sure I got all the twine off before cutting, and things went smoothly. My saw exhaust did catch the bale on fire for a minute, but it was no big deal, had some water handy.
