I am thrilled that our straw area has been filled up with nice big seven foot large square bales of good quality straw, while I do like the filled bags of wood shavings for certain things and I perfer them in the summer to point as they seem to hold the smell down better, they however take longer to compost out, this would bother me more if I had to put them in the regular compost, but I tend to use them to help make certain area’s of the garden or the food forest more acid based for certain plants.

Now that winter is on the way (even if it does not seem that way this week) the straw will be much needed as I have rabbit doe’s due in just a week, and a huge pile for the pig’s is goes a long way to helping them all conserve their body heat and therefor sending those calories into growing for the babies, not in keeping warm..

And after a summer an fall of cleaning out the deep packs for the hugelcultures, its time to start the trend in the other way, we want to start creating the deep pack bedding, I put another 2500 pds of extra straw on hold for the winter as I will be birthing out not just the sheep this year but also a girl and her calf, add in the fact that I am really thinking about timing a Miss Piggy litter to match up with the increase in milk flow from the cow and I will need lots of extra bedding for that as well..

Thankfully also I was able to get my regular 2000 pds of straw for bedding down my fruit tree’s, bushes and garden this year, as well as having the same amount for spring bedding/mulching in the garden this coming year.. wow did I ever see the difference this year when we were very! low on straw, last spring was so wet that most folks could not get into their fields to plant wheat on time, and this past summer was so hot and dry it was crazy, who know’s what the coming summer will bring. I am trying to plan for any kind of weather.

The garden seed catalogs are starting to come in and its forcing me to look at the garden, even though to be honest, I just wanted to forget about it for a little while, I have used the straw to bed down rows of fall planted carrots, I have high hopes that I will be able to cover the bed in the spring and force them to start early and to be able to pull back the straw and have fresh carrots very early in the spring this coming year, we will see if it works well.

We had a poor strawberry year and I hope to get back to my regular crop this spring which will require a goodly amount of straw as mulch to get my rows back into proper order.

Do you mulch in the fall? Do you use Deep Pack Bedding in your barns? Have you over wintered carrots and how did it go? If you have birthed out calvies in March, how much bedding did you put aside for it?