We ended up bringing in 14 bales of pine straw from off of the farm. In the future I think we can just pull from the farm, but honestly, this was just easier. At about $3 each it was worth it to us to save the time and energy that we would have spent raking and gathering. We brought in the 14 bales, used about 10 of them on the beds on top of the mulch we had already added. It made it a lot more aesthetically pleasing as well as filled in areas that were sparsely mulched. We used the other 4 bales to surround all of our sensitive little saplings. The apples would probably be alright without filling the cage to the height that we did, but we did them last and the cage was already in place, so we just used the last of the pine straw. The paw paws are more sensitive so they have plastic wrapped around the outside, about three quarters of the way around the cage. We did the same thing to the fig, including the plastic, and laid some pine straw around the bottom of the goji berries and the gladiolas as well. All of the pine straw in the cages is very loosely placed in the cage. We're going for insulation, not suffocation. We'll leave this set up in place for the next two months or so during the coldest months. Then, probably in early February, we'll take it all down, prune them while they're dormant, and put it all back up until after the last frost.
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