My experience is that straw is not as weed free as usually advertised.

You'll need to pull out the stuff that's growing. But it will be easier than pulling weeds that are solidly rooted in dirt.

I had the same problem.
I ended up raking out all the hay straw and wheat seedlings and replacing it with pine straw.
I still am pulling up stray wheat plants.

OK, thanks for the advice. I hate to have to remove all the straw, but I also don't want to battle the grass all season. I guess I'll first try raking the hay to dislodge the grass, if that doesn't work, I'll have to remove it. We don't have pine needles readily available in my area, has anyone used salt hay with success?

Sorry to disagree with the other posters but as we have used hay and straw to mulch with for years I have to. ;)

If you have lots of weeds then your straw was likely not laid on thickly enough to begin with. 4-6" minimum is needed and 8" is even better. So all you have to do is pile more mulch on top of the weeds that have sprouted. We usually add an additional layer of mulch every couple of weeks. Raking it now will only get you even more weeds so just lay on more.

If, on the other hand, all you are seeing is a few wheat seeds that have sprouted, they are easily pulled as they are rooted in the mulch not the dirt or you can just lay more mulch on top of them. ;)

Dave

Sounds as if you used hay with weed seed vs. straw. Anyway, I have never used salt hay, but we have an ample supply of eel grass available. It makes for a great mulch and it is free for the taking. Not enough salt to harm any of the plants either. Get it when it dries out a bit. It is tough going when it is wet.

Straw can have weed seeds or wheat seeds that are missed during harvest, and hay definitely can have weed seeds, but I don't know how salt hay is different. I do know that I have gotten bails of pine straw at lowes for about the same price as bails of straw. Probably could get it at other box stores too.
And I do agree that piling it thicker may help your problem if you prefer to keep your straw.
Hope you find a solution!

My Garden Blog

I definitely used straw, not hay. The seeds are not weeds from not having a thick enough layer, they are wheat sprouts and are from the straw. And, unfortunately, they are not just a few, there are tons, too many to pull up by hand. Thanks for all the advice, as I am a new gardener! I think I will attempt to rake up the straw and use salt hay.

Same here. I ended up pulling it out along with anything I planted there because you couldn’t see the garlic through the weeds. Planted something else & will mulch later with something else.

Old thread but I too have used straw as mulch........once. One of the worst gardening mistakes I ever made!! I felt like I needed a combine to drive over the garden to get rid of the field of wheat that appeared as a result.

As noted ten years ago, gotta be careful. Hay and straw are sometimes sold interchangeably, but they're not the same thing. Hay has seeds. Real straw has no, as in zero, seeds. Hay has loads of straw. I saw in a nursery a bundle of hay that was labelled as straw. Just look at it.

Mine was sold by a nursery in early fall as a typical bale of straw used frequently for harvest and Halloween decorating. Looked like your basic bale of straw - dried, golden brown stalks with no visible signs of any seeds or other plant parts. Big surprise the following spring!!

Straw can have seeds. It just tends to have them in a much lesser quantity than hay. Just because it is really straw (and not hay) does not make it 100% seed free.

Formally, straw is the stalk of cereal after the grain has been removed. It has zero seeds by definition. But yes, in practice, the job of removing all that grain can be imperfect. So what is "really straw" may not really be. I've used straw that was harvested by hand, and cut with some care. It had no seeds.

Disappointed that no one explained how I am to get my vegetable garden back in shape after the straw grew like tall grass all over.

I am pulling it out piece by piece and loosing precious top soil.

Yep, we explained that what you have to do to get your garden back in shape is not to use poor quality straw. But just throw it all in your compost pile and, eventually, it'll all go right back on your top soil.

I've used seedy straw- good straw isn't readily available around here for a decent price. didn't know that the first year or two living out here, lol. Ah well, it got buried and turned and solarized...

So some other things with straw... even seedy straw.

In the fall I'll bag up the bales in giant black contractor bags, seal them up... then use them over the winter for insulating bins and such. Let them cook through the spring, then use it as a mid to later summer mulch when some plants are getting pulled or others could use a mulch refresh. This trick also kills the hell out of where ever you set the bales up. In a long run way, this can work to set up a quick and dirty future garden bed- set up one fall to process into a real bed the following fall.

A warning though- if you get breaks in the bags and water gets in- these can also go extremely hot with composting. One summer I opened a couple damaged bags and they were well steaming inside.

I've also done straw bale gardening a couple times too- by the time the bale is done growing out for the year- and been weeding it... the bale is well spent to then be used for mulch in the garden. This year I'm going to be tinkering a bit with mushroom growing in straw bales. Fairly deep shade location, so might light-starve the weeds out a bit. If it goes well, lots of mushrooms then a couple spent bales for layering in on a couple raised beds. If not so well.. well, it will make for good compost :)

Another bit is another fall one. Once your bed is clean and cleared, lay out the straw in a flake depth instead of breaking it up- then cover with plastic and let it solarize and heat and die and freeze and insulate the bed to warm it up quicker than the garden around it. I've not done it myself, but I've heard this can be a nice way to store root crops in ground into winter so the ground does not freeze too hard to get crops out.

That's interesting. You say putting the straw, or hay for that matter, in black plastic contractor bags and leaving the bags in the sun solarizes and kills the seeds? I hear you need 140F for a few hours to kill grass seeds effectively, and I'm not sure a full black plastic bag, left in the sun, will reach that temperature, except maybe right under the illuminated surface. Such a bag is a terrific insulator. Hot composting will certainly do it.

it can probably get much hotter, but i've never used black plastic. only clear film, however that's on bare soil which is black so absorbs the heat.

see this link. there is some useful weed/seed information as well on soil solarization

they reported a temperature of 180F compared to using black plastic.

No question that with either black or clear plastic, the sunlit side of the bag will get hot. What I'm saying is that I can't believe the CENTER of the bag will get that hot. Lots of insulation between the center of the bag and the sunlit side. But yes, for solarization of a surface, clear is much better than black. Black plastic gets the plastic hot. Clear plastic gets the surface hot.

i'd imagine it depends how tightly packed the straw was in the bag.. a whole bale? probably not hot enough. i would just mulch with it and then just throw a film over it. that is what i did one year i bought a bad batch of hay with tons of seed. that worked in killing off the seeds, including anything that managed to germinate shortly after covering with a plastic, the weeds were short lived.

I've never stuck a thermometer in a bale... but I have opened damaged bags up to find them steaming hot in the center. And don't usually have sprouting problems with even undamaged bagged bales after they have sat through the winter and cooked till halfway into the summer. Maybe they get hot enough and light blocked out enough that it works to nuke the seeds or kill off the sprouts before they become seedlings.

OK, but as you said, if there is moisture inside, the heat won't be from the sun. In fact, intentionally moistening the straw and letting it hot-compost in the bag will both give you compost AND kill the seeds. Of course, that moisture can also induce the seeds to sprout, in which case much lower temperatures will kill them all.

I have grass killer which I purchased to kill Bermuda grass. I add leaf sticker to the mix. I too have grass growing from the straw I put on my garden to keep weeds out...but it isisis nnotnot working when I use grass killer. Not sure why I can't go back and delete mistakes here.