The feed stores near me carry them. Check feed stores.

I used a mess of straw last year- and now it's sprouting (but the sprouts are easy as pie to pull out of the lasagna and compost).

Don't believe that there's no seeds in straw, except under certain conditions. Salt hay/straw is supposed to be near seed free.

If it's just mulch that you want- use shredded leaves. free, a waste product, and as good as anything you can buy (IMO).

I'm looking for a source of 'brown' for my compost. Leaves are not plentiful at this time (and i didn't collect what i could last year.. doh).

Realistically though.. wouldn't composting kill the seeds in either hay or straw?

Hot composting will kill the seeds. This is still a reasonable time of year to pick up some OPL, if you have a car that fits them.

Straw is rare around here too so we use more hay but always try to get it from the 2nd or 3rd mowing as it has less seeds. As pablo said, HOT composting will kill most of the seed problems.

But straw bales can be found here at feed/farm stores and some of the garden centers have them early in spring. Even Wal Mart brings in a lot of them in the fall so I pick up several then and store them in the barn over the winter.

Landscapers will likely have straw, also farmers - especially those with cattle and horses. Take a drive, stop at a couple of farms and ask if you might buy a few bales. Even if the farmer doesn't have any to spare, I bet he could tell you who does!

we've used hay and straw and never gotten any real sprouting porblems with either as we use them about 8"s thick, for us but we always have gotten sprouting from straw as when they harvest the grain crop the machines miss a lot of grain, so when we have used straw we have let the chooks scratch around in it first and they value add, but the sprouting is no worry it's not like they are realy weeds, and can be easily pulled and tucked back under the mulch as extra nutrient source.

we have had good results with spoilt pasture grass hay's and again never any growths.

the way we understand it is straw is a 'brown' good for carbon, and the spoilt hays's are green so they add lots of nutrients and nitrogen.

we don't use any fertilisers so something is working.

len

Here is a link that might be useful: len's garden page