Where do you find straw for sale? I look on craigslist and hardly ever see it. When I find it, it seems expensive. Can you get it at feed stores?

I've yet to use straw so I'm wondering if there is anything else I should know about it. Are there different varieties? Do you have to ask about whether or not it was sprayed with pesticide while growing or fungicides for storage or anything like that? Anything else a newbie should know? Thanks!

You can buy straw at feed stores, but it's quite expensive. We finally found a local farmer last year and just asked him when to contact him to get straw --- the answer was, I believe, June and November. That will depend on your climate, though, and on what kind of grains farmers grow there. It's best to get a big load at once, since the grains tend to ripen only twice a year.

There are different kinds of straw --- depending on what kind of grain it comes from. My understanding is that, for mulch, it doesn't make that big of a difference. (If you were building a straw bale house, that would be different.) In a perfect world, you'd ask if it was organically grown, but we didn't have many choices, so went with what was available. I suspect that the healthy soil food web under straw mulch breaks down most problematic chemicals in short order. (I wouldn't use non-organic straw to grow mushrooms, though.)