May 11, 2008 05:37 am I felt bad for the Agway employee on the telephone. He was trying to be helpful but I wasn't making any sense. I told him I was looking for a particular type of hay — lucerne hay. I said it's something you would feed a horse, I think, but I don't want it to feed a horse. I want it for my garden. He said they had a product called Dengie Hi-Fi, but he thought it had molasses in it. It was $12.99 for a big bag. A bag? I was looking for something in a bail, and something much cheaper than that. I had him spell the name for me anyway and told him I would look it up to see if it would work. I hung up the phone and felt like giving up. It was a familiar feeling. It's that feeling I seem to get anytime I try to follow instructions for some alternative, good-for-the-Earth lawn or gardening project. It always sounds easy, as if the only reason most people don't do it is because they're ignorant anti-environmentalists. Then I find myself calling every garden store and farm stand within a 5-mile radius asking for some product they've never heard of. Right now, I'm trying to build some raised-bed vegetable gardens using the "no-dig" method. There are numerous Web sites that offer instructions, and many of them call for at least one thick layer of lucerne hay. The hay goes on top of a layer of cardboard or newspapers, which you put down to kill the grass or weeds where you want the garden to be. Some of the Web sites explain why lucerne hay is good: It supplies the garden with carbon and nitrogen. I have yet to find one of these guides that explains what lucerne hay is or where one might find it. What I do know is that you won't find it at my local Agway. Dengie Hi-Fi, as far as I can tell from the manufacturer's Web site, is not hay. It's horse feed that you scoop into a bucket. I can't imagine what the guy on the phone thought I was going to do with that in my garden. I like that his biggest concern was whether it would work for me because of the molasses. Researching horse feed led me to an important clue, though. The primary ingredient in the Dengie Hi-Fi is alfalfa. That reminded me that one of my theories was that lucerne is a type of alfalfa hay. A quick search led me to the Wikipedia entry for alfalfa where I learned that lucerne hay is what people in the United Kingdom call alfalfa hay. It was as if I had spent the afternoon calling department stores asking for a jumper, only to find out later that what I was really looking for was a sweater. None of this matters because none of the stores I called had hay anyway. What they do sell is soil, many varieties of soil. So here's my recipe for a "no dig" garden. Make a frame. Fill it with soil. I'm going to put cardboard under mine to block grass from growing up through it. I might get fancy and toss in last year's compost on top of the cardboard, too. British horses can have their lucerne hay. My American plants with have to make do with plain old dirt. Julie Kirkwood is a freelance writer for The Eagle-Tribune. Her column, Yard Dirt, appears most weeks in At Home, Sunday North. She also keeps a gardening blog, Yard Dirt: Sharing Seeds, at www.eagletribune.com.
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