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I think i've made a mistake. I recieved some hay from a mate after his Barley harvest and put it down onto the crops in the vege garden.
Now I have Barley coming up everywhere.
can I do anything with it ? it's good quality .

I was thinking of putting some hay down in the chicken run and see if it comes up there?????? Not sure though.

Yeah, that used happen to me all the time, until I processed all mulch throught the chook pen, they get most of the seeds.

Nev

Barley soup?

You can just feed the green stalks to the chooks, and they'll love it that way. You'll probably find it hasn't rooted very deeply, so should come out very easily.

We had the same problem this past summer, when I used barley straw (not hay) bales for raised beds, and had walls of barley coming up from the bales. I just pulled it all as the seed heads developed and fed to chooks and rabbits.

Cheers
Andrea
NZ

thanks, Farmerdrea
Yes it does seem shallow in the root department. I've been pulling it out, I'm still waiting on my new chooks, can it lie in the chook pen for a bit? It won't go moldy?
What's the difference between straw and hay?
Ahh see, this may be my problem. It either comes in a big grassy round thing or a small grassy square thing. I've always used lucerne hay for feed so I've never bothered to learn about different grasses. (except for Couch/Kykuya grass which is second to lucerne hay, put that everywhere around the property and you'll never run out of feed.)

Hay is the goodness of the grazing/grass crop, cut down to about 4-5 inches from the soil surface (sometimes lower if there aren't a lot of stones in the pasture), dried, turned, turned again and then baled (into small bales, or large bales, or even large rounds.

Straw is the stalky stuff that's left when cereal crops are cut for their seed heads (wheat, barley, oat, rye). The best goodness from those is obviously the seedhead, but the stalks also contain some nutrition in the from of digestible dry matter and the preserved sugars of the plant (oat is probably the most nutritious, wheat the least, as far as sugar content goes).

I look at it in terms of winter fodder for my goats and cattle, others look at it in terms of mulch (whatever our livestock doesn't eat does get made in mulch and compost at the end of the season).

Straw often has lots of seed left in the stalks, hence the growth you've got. If you don't have chooks to which you can fed it now, if you throw it in their pen, the worms will begin to work on it, and then it will be great fun for the chooks to forage in when they move in.

Cheers
Andrea
NZ

Thanks sooo much Andrea. I've just learnt something.