Straw Bale Gardening

The Easy Way to Grow Your Veggies

Planning your base

Straw bale gardening is just another alternative for the way you grow your own delicious vegetables. It is especially advantageous if your back is not as strong as it used to be. Raised gardening makes it more comfortable and the bale allows easy access all around. You will enjoy your outside activity even more while you grow your own produce and become self-sufficient. Besides, it surely beats the food you find in the supermarket. You will have no-pesticides vegetables, and they will be more nutritious; you will find their taste out of this world.

Straw bale gardening will meet your requirements for a more robust health for years to come.

You can start with a single bale, but you can just as easily have a row of bales and garden to your leisure.

The idea is to get the bales carried to your garden site and place them exactly where you need them.

Once in place, it is next to impossible to move them, as they are quite heavy.

You should prefer wheat or oat straw bales over the hay bales. In the straw bales you can expect seeds and some weeds, while the wheat or oat straw contain almost none as they are the stalks left after harvesting the grain.

A bale should give you a good two years of fresh produce if you treat it well; it may sag a bit but the vegetables won’t mind. After this time, the bale would be great for compost or mulch.

Try and get some slightly aged bales - of about 6 months. This way you won’t have to keep soaking them to get them ready and fit for growing your new plants. Let me explain the problem with green bales. A green hay bale presents a risk for you and for your plants. As soon as a green bale gets wet the microbes inside begin to digest the hay and this process is generating a lot of heat. reaching a temperature of 150 degrees Fahrenheit before they cooled back down. This process has been known to start fires in barns due to leaky roofs dripping on stacks of green hay. Your seedlings could not stand this temperature.

To prevent this situation, you have to be diligent and keep watering your green bales. This will be your main task. But if you’re lucky you can find bales that have withstood rainy weather for at least 6 months.

Let’s Start Planting Your Bale Garden

To make a success of your straw bale gardening, lay the bales lengthwise so you can work around them easily which makes planting easier. Be sure to leave the string around each bale as it will hold it in place. If it starts to snag too much, put stakes in at both ends.

If you put a layer of compost soil on your bale, you can go ahead and plant the seeds on top. Remember your bales will be history in a couple of years. Young plants can go straight in. Pull apart or use a trowel and, depending on the state of the straw, put a handful of compost soil, and then let the straw go back into place.

What to expect from each bale:

==> With straw bale gardening, it's hard to put solid stakes in, so big tomato plants are out, although they will happily dangle over the edge.

==> A couple of smaller tomato plants per bale with one or two herbs and leafy veggies in between.

==> Annuals and vegetables, herbs or flowers will love it.

==> Each bale should take up to half a dozen cucumbers, trailing down; or up to 3 plants of squash, zucchini and melons.

==> Why not poke in around the sides a plant or two of some flowering annual for color and companion if you like.

Keep this in mind:

==> Once every other week water in a liquid organic feed, such as compost tea or fish emulsion. Tip some worms on top if you want to use your bales only one season.

==> After the season is done, take the bales and add them to your compost pile. You'll be ready for next season.

Go ahead, be adventurous and have fun, you will be richly rewarded. As you benefit from the bounties of your garden, you will also benefit from a healthy mind and body.