Well, That's It 'Til Next Year

I hope this little diary (built in retrospect) will inspire you to consider straw bales as a viable alternative gardening method. It certainly impressed me!

Things to Consider

Mother Natures Only Goof-up in My Garden
Purchase straw bales, not hay.

Bales left outside for one year can be planted into without having to condition them using fertilizer. (or so I have read)

Bales that have been watered in place all year are VERY HEAVY and hard to relocate.

Have a plan for the bales that have thoroughly decomposed at the end of the year. Mine were spread about as compost in the surrounding forest.

Only plant what you can eat, store or give away.

Don't over-plant. Give your bedding plants room to grow. (I may reconsider squash next year!!)

All Good Things Must End

The time to put the garden away had finally come. The netting was removed, the structure taken down and the last of the plants pulled from the bales. Three of six bales were still in pretty good shape, and three just fell apart in a rich humus. I think I will try and grow potatoes in those three good bales this season if they have wintered well.

I wanted to show a couple of pictures of the root structures of a couple of the plants. In the past, in my container gardens, the roots hardly ever changed much from the day they were planted.

The above picture is one of the tomato plants root structure.

This is the root clump inter-twined with the straw from the basil plant. My foot is just to demonstrate the scale.

Some of the Yield

Lebanese Cucumbers. After eating them in sandwiches and salads, this was what was left at the end of the year when we cleaned out the garden.

The last of the tomatoes. Only a couple of the green ones were too dryed up to ever ripen, but we ate tomatoes all season long.

Winter Squash - Soup anyone. I actually gave several away and then ended up making the last of them into Maple Syrup and Roasted Squash Soup. Yummy. The shoe is just for scale.

The Sad Little Red Pepper. OK, I wouldn't recommend growing them under everything else, as this was the entire yield.

A Late Season

All of the waiting in the beginning paid off on the back-end, as things just kept growing and growing. This is a picture taken in October. It's not very focused, but what I'm trying to show is that there is a tomato blossom in the middle of the picture. In late October.

This is one of the bean plants late in October. I wouldn't have wanted to eat these beans as they were very tough and hanging from the neighboring tree in places. The plant had grown so large that it grasped the nearby branches of the oak tree and we literally had beans hanging in the tree.

More Goodness

Unripe Squash

Cucumber

Squash Blossom with a honey bee busy inside

Cherry Tomatoes

Runner Beans

Healthy Plants

Curly Parsley

Peppery Nasturtiums

Flat or Italian Parsley

Luscious Blemish Free Tomatoes

More Basil than Imaginable

This is the first time that I can remember having so much planted so closely together and not having any disease or bug infestations. No ear-wigs, no slugs, no aphids. The summer of 2010 was a wet one, so I didn't do much additional watering, but I also didn't have any mildew problems. The plants that grew were all strong specimens, even the bean plants that started out so sad looking.

The bales occasionally sprouted mushrooms which didn't have any effect on the edible plants, and quite often hay-seed within the bale would sprout. This could easily be trimmed off with scissors, but I let the dog nibble it as it was so fresh and sweet.

I believe that by planting a small variety of a few vegetables, there was nothing that became a magnet for great hoards of infestatious visitors. The garden was planted in full sun, and mother nature looked after most of the watering. Occasionally, if the bales felt dry, I would water them, but usually they were only dry on the outside. If I poked my fingers in, it was warm and moist within the bale.