HelpfulGardener.com

Has anybody used sea weed to start their garden. Do I wash it? I have yard of compost. Iam starting with what I think is clay soil.

Seaweed can be put in compost however, it needs to be washed of the salt. You cannot put a lot of it in the compost because you can make the compost to saline to be useable.

I did alot of research and I have a endless supply so iam going to use it as mulch.

I think you do have to rinse it first. I'm thinking one of those bread carrying trays might work well as a "colander"

Will you be drying them first?

From what I have read some people wash it some people don't. Iam going to wash it because thats what my grandfather did. Iam going to rinse it twice then dry it. Probably chop it up somehow maybe by lawn mower or maybe by hand.

We got a truckload of seaweed from the ocean cleanup. It was free but there were a lot of conditions required before they would give it away. They wanted to make sure it would not end up back in the ocean. This debris is regularly dragged out of the ocean and contains fishing nets, plastic and other marine debris. Most of the seaweed were brought here attached to the hulls of ships and are not the kind of seaweed we want around here.

It was not washed and a lot of it was added to the compost pile. The pile took over a year before it was finished and when it was tested it was too salty to use. It took another year of adding more compost and leaching it with water to make it useable.

This is dead eel grass that has washed up on shore. Native to the waters here.( zotera marina). I plan on using it as mulch.