Straw Bale Gardening - take 1

I'm not sure just where I heard about straw bale gardening, but whatever I saw was enough to get me looking for more information. Our veggie garden has never been terrifically successful. We can grow rhubarb like nobody's business (my biggest plant is over four feet in diameter already!), and have had good luck with peas. We used to get great cherry tomatoes, but not the last few years. And we've had off and on luck with peppers. A few years ago, we tried self watering containers, figuring that, if nothing else, the black containers would give the peppers the heat they need to thrive. While not great - the self watering part NEVER worked - we did get somewhat better results. But any kind of root crop - including carrots - was a bust. There's just too much clay. The carrots hit the clay and come to a screeching halt at about three inches long.  And between the raspberries on the east side and the huge rhubarb plants, we ended up with shady areas. Veggies hate shade.

Straw bale gardens address all these issues and more.

First, since your stuff is planted two feet above the ground, it's not contending with the rhubarb for sun. The raspberries still pose a bit of an issue, but since they're on the east, things still get the critical afternoon sun.

Second, the veggies grow in decomposing straw - and that's a whole lot softer than clay! I understand carrots love them. We shall see.

Third, bales are consistently warm to hot if you do it right. Hot weather crops like that. It also means  you can plant them a lot earlier, as the bales can be at least 30 degrees warmer than the soil at the start of the growing season. And if you use a soaker hose and have it come on for a few minutes a couple of times a day, the straw stays evenly moist and just about everything likes that.

Fourth, although this wasn't such a big deal for us, since you plant in new bales every year, you don't have to worry about moving plants around to avoid diseases carried in the soil. It's like new soil every time you plant!

I did some research and we decided to give it a go. We didn't go all out, but got five bales of hay (we ended up with hay instead of straw - they both work, but we might end up with seeds sprouting in the hay) and the fertilizer and got going. If we really like it, we'll probably make it more permanent next year. The book I read recommends five bales per person! That's a lot of veggies - and I don't think we have room for that many.

So how do you get started?

Lay down some landscape fabric, newspaper or something to block weeds. We used plastic, and found out later that's not a good choice, as it can mean the hay sits in water. I raised the bales a bit by inserting small pieces of wood at each end, and cut off the excess you see in the picture below.

Put the bales with the cut side up. If you have straw, you'll see the hollow stems  (hence the name!) that fill with water. Hay doesn't have quite the same structure, but might be a bit better growing medium because it has more protein than straw. (I have to note that the rhubarb plant there is the aforementioned four foot one.)

(If you don't know the difference, hay is grown to feed animals. Straw is the stalk left when the grain (wheat, oats, rye...) is chopped off the top. It's used for bedding in barns because it's absorbent. And it works for growing stuff!)

Then you add fertilizer and water - lots and lots of both. What they do is start the composting process, giving your veggies something with which to nourish themselves. The book I read (Straw Bale Gardens by Joel Karsten) said you can use regular old lawn fertilizer or go organic. We're not sticklers for organic, but somehow eating stuff grown in lawn fertilizer just seemed...wrong. So organic it was. It's much weaker than the commercial stuff. And I mean MUCH weaker.  Instead of 1/2 cup per bale (I think - might be 1), it's three. And then you water. I started with four gallons per bale. Since Karsten recommends warm water (cold water shuts down all kinds of reproductive activity, including bacterial), that meant hauling it up from the basement. The fertilizer just sat on top

Before cutting

of the bales. I didn't think that could do much good, so I took a machete - nothing else would work! - and cut slices in the bales and shoved the fertilizer down. Then I read that Karsten was running a whole day of talks about the subject and went to one of them. He suggested shoving a knife or spade in the bale and holding a hole open and pouring the fertilizer in. I did that for the last few doses (it totals about 15 cups per bale!), and that worked quite well. By day 7, the bales were at 92 degrees. Mind you, on day 4, we had snow and the whole week was really cold! I rigged row covers over the bales to keep any heat in. I tend to read some information and

After cutting

then kind of garden by gut feel. By day 14, the bales went as high as 120 degrees. If you use conventional means, you plant on day 12. For organic, it's day 18. Maybe the bales take longer to get going and thus longer to cool? I dunno. What I do know is that the bale temp dropped, as promised, to around 90 degrees by day 17. I planted a day early, just due to scheduling. The day I plugged my tomato into the bale, the soil temp was close to 60, way too cool for such a warm weather plant. If all goes according to plan, I'll have tomatoes quite some time before anyone doing traditional planting. Note: now I'm down to about 2 gallons per bale, although it's hard to measure with the drip hose.

For things grown from seed, all I did was dump a couple of inches of sterile potting soil - NOT garden dirt - on top of a bale, pound it down a bit to firm it up and plant the seeds. For seedlings, you shove a spade in, hold open a hole, drop in a bit more dirt and put your plant in. Potatoes are simple, if not easy. Shove the seed potato way down into the bale. These bales are so tightly packed I had a heck of a time doing it! They're in with the peas, and should emerge about the time the peas are done. That's it. Then water every day and fertilize once a month.

Before coming up with this plan, we'd already joined a CSA for the summer. That really drove our decisions about what to plant. You always get tons of greens from a CSA, so we didn't plant any lettuce, spinach, etc. We planted things we knew would 1) keep (potatoes, peppers, tomatoes (you can freeze them)) or 2) we'd eat even if we got them from the CSA (peas, carrots, broccoli, strawberries). And we're tucking in some flowers and herbs. You can plant the sides of the bales, too.  I'm excited to see how it all comes out.