Free Mulch!

Here on the Island, we have free mulch, but no one knows about it.

All you have to do is go to a local beach, preferably one near a marsh, in the spring. In springtime all of last year's salt hay, or marsh grass, breaks off and floats around in the water. After a storm, it washes up in huge piles on the beach. In the old days, people collected it for mulch.

The marsh without the marsh grass: it's all broken off and floated away to a nearby beach. In the summer it will grow back and this will be a sea of tall green grass that ripples in the wind.

You can buy salt hay, or straw that companies call salt hay (even though it isn't--it's usually oat straw), and it is expensive. But there's no reason to pay for it, since it's free on our beaches--you just have to do the work of picking it up and hauling it home.

I'm sure that if it was left lying on the beach, it would fulfill some role in the ecosystem: as it decomposed, it would provide nutrients to the marsh, or food for tiny water creatures. It's not left lying on the beach, though, because the town sends guys with trucks to clean the beach every spring, and they gather it up and throw it into huge dumpsters. So, I don't feel bad taking some, since they're only going to use it to add to a landfill.

I use it as a mulch, layering six inches or more around all my plants, using the "lasagna gardening" system. Last year I had huge tomato plants and not one weed--none of them could come up through the layers of marsh hay. I also didn't have to water much, because the mulch kept the soil evenly moist.

This year I just missed the gathering time--the town workers beat me to it, and one day when I drove by the beach I saw those huge dumpsters loaded with salt hay. The next day, they were gone. Today I went to that beach and saw that the guys had left a few piles behind--and you can bet I'll be over there with my giant plastic bags as soon as I'm off work!