Bale Fail

Sorry to say, the straw bale planting experiment so far has been a total failure. And I thought maybe it was just me, but my other friends who tried the bale experiment haven't had much luck either. At first, all the plants looked like they were doing fine, but then they just withered away. Meanwhile, the stuff in my garden is thriving and growing like crazy. I know there's lots of great photos on the internet of straw bale gardens just bursting forth, but I wonder if maybe they are using some kind of fertilizer on them? I was under the impression that the composting bale would have enough nutrition for the plants to grow in (in addition to the dirt I put into each hole in the bale that I planted in.) but it doesn't look like it was enough for my poor little plants.

If anyone has bale garden tips and techniques or success storied, I'd love to hear them!

Bales of Fun

The straw bales are definitely doing their job, composting away and become another vegetable garden. When I went to plant in them, I dug a hole in each to fill with dirt/compost. Inside the bales it is definitely HOT! So they are composting on the inside, and the plants I've put in them so far are doing very well. I used the double-high bale fence around the garden to plant cucumbers, squash, zucchini, and pumpkins, hoping that they'll just spill over the side into the garden area. In the area with just single bales, I put some more tomatoes, artichokes, and some mystery plants (stuff I started from seed but the labels got too wet, so now I don't know what they are!)

In the front garden, I've got all of my pole beans planted, a week earlier than last year. And Wayne fenced off a new area to transplant all of the tomatoes from our cold frames. It's funny, but they took so long to germinate that I thought it was a bust to try to grow them from seed, so I went out and bought some tomato starts. No sooner did I have those installed in the back garden than my cold frame tomato seeds took off like wildfire. Now the tomatoes in the cold frames are almost as big as the starts I bought! So the bottom line is that I have 12 more tomato plants than I bargained for, which means I guess I'll be canning a lot of salsa this year.

Speaking of bonuses, a friend salvaged a TON of little blueberry plants from the yard waste recycling center, so now I need to find places around the yard to transplant a bunch of baby blueberries. Not that I'm complaining or anything...

Turning Straw Into Gold

Strawbale gardening: it's not something I'd heard of until this year. My friend loaned me the book Food Not Lawns, an excellent resource for yard transformation which I'm reading, and we've been thinking on how we can restructure our massively sloped north-facing back yard to be more of a food producing zone in the "paradise garden" style that the author discusses in that book. But that's a multi-year project to say the least. In the meanwhile, we had some pressing problems like how to effectively fence off our raised beds from the pups that joined our family this year, what to do with the big dirt patch in the middle of the lawn where the trampoline was until recently, where to put the blueberries and raspberry starts (hopefully in a dedicated berry patch) and how to keep some lawn for the dogs while beginning to transform the rest.

Enter the strawbale! Did you know you can grow things right in a strawbale? You basically put the bale where you want it, get it wet to start the decomposition process, wait a few days, make a hole in the top and put in your plants. So our new fence around the raised beds is now going to be a double-high strawbale garden, thus giving us even more growing room with no extra digging or planning for the year. We've mulched in between the raised beds with straw, in the eventual plan to turn the beds into a more free-flowing design with water channels to reduce water needs. For the next couple of years, the strawbale mulch will begin this process by turning the paths to more usable ground.

And that big dirt hole where the trampoline was located? Now covered with straw bales which will house even more plants. The new berry patch is fenced off with twine in the upper right corner of the yard. Stay tuned for how the big strawbale experiment turns out!