mulch and pastures

  SOem where i read htat leah sattler is waiting for her straw mulch to break down , so her pastures grow and the comment has fermented in my mind and i have asked myself how mulch fits in with pasture land.
  Also i made some mini huglekulture beds and put a bit of dry grass on top and suddenly,l a few weeks later, thinking of Paul Wheatons proposal that tomatoe plants wil grow better from seed than from seedlings have been grabbed by my own doubts about mulch. I thought the mulch wil stop the tomatoe seeds growing. and i have taken it off the bed.
    Those permaculture vegetable growers were planting seedlings through the mulch, what happens if you plant seeds under the mulch?
  As to Lea Sattlers  pastures, will they grow up through the mulch? My grass dies down  as soon as the real heat starts but by next spring  all the dea grass has all disapeared and the new grass grows up through the fead grass easily in autumn but then maybe i have pretty thin crop of grass and someone else could hace put down a really thick amount of straw mulch and then the grass would not grow up through it and they would have no pasture next year. Any one got information to fill in on mulch on pasture lands and growing seeds on mulched beds.  rose macaskie. 

that reminded me also of Pauls experiement challenge to put in tomato seeds..so i have planted in my Michigan garden 3 kinds of tomato seeds and some already started plants..we'll see if the seeds sprout..how they grow..generally in Michigan plants don't even go out until sometime in June, but i have had mine out for a couple weeks now as we have had a super warm spring here ..very unusual

Brenda did you mulch the seeds. If you  did, will they come up through the mulch. Do you think mulching should be put on after seeds grow if you are growing things from seed? 
      I put in some tomatoes plants with a peice of relativlly stiff plastic tied into a tube as a wall round them  them and the cold has not hurt them. Rose.

Not sure if this is the information that you are asking about but....  I have purchased 110 acres including 30 acres of trees that are reclaiming land all by themselves, about 70 acres of pasture land, 10 acres of reeds and reed grass that used to be a lake.  It hasn't been a lake for a long time apparently but it has been unused for about 5 years. Currently we have about 4 feet of grass growing through 5 years of laid over dead grass.  Everyone around us has dried up pastures and mine are thriving.  As I push my way through the shoulder high grasses (thick and dense) my feet go squish squish in the muck.  It seems that left alone my pasture is turning into a lake again.  So I would conclude that mulch on pasture would only benefit the pasture as long as it is not overmulched.  I should say that my pasture is native grasses that grew there as the lake dissapeared and not seeded hay.
As for the tomato question I tried this experiment a long time ago.  After frost I picked all the young tomatoes off, cleared the dead plants to the compost and tossed the little tomatoes back in the holes left by the tomatoes coming out.  Mulch on the garden over winter as usual.  In the spring pull back mulch and put in transplants as usual.  As I practice crop rotation I was able to readily identify the volunteers.  I let any volunteer tomatoes that sprouted grow.  The self-seeded tomatoes not only sprouted through the mulch but outgrew and the tomatoes on them were a full two weeks ahead of the ones I had transplanted in (started 6-8 weeks before last frost).  I am sure that if I had pulled back the mulch in the spring over where the tomatoes had been left in over winter that they would have sprouted sooner due to warmer soil conditions.  Now I just plant my tomatoes where I want them to grow next year and only do transplants of new varieties I want to try.
If of course you have a greenhouse or the space you could start your tomatoes way earlier and get better results from your transplants.

rose there is mulch around but not on top of my seeds and plants, and as far as the experiment, i have had MUCH better results from the transplants than the seeded tomatos..the transplants have baby green tomatos all over them, the seeded tomatos are up and growing, but they are small and haven't bloomed yet.

they are in the same garden space under the same conditions.

as for the pastures growing in mulch..if you have read Manasobu Fukoka "One Straw Revolution"..he would just put the straw back on the field and broadast his pasture seeds into the fields and they would grow..but i think that they were broadcast OVER the mulch rather than UNDER it, however the plants that were under the mulch probably did grow if they were perennial and not smothered.

My mulches here are put on "around" my  plants, i haven't tried broadcasting OVER the mulches here..may do that sometime but so far haven't..i generally pull it aside if iam planting after, and tuck the seeds into the soil, and leave the mulch off of the tops