welcome to my straw bale experiment so for all the years of gardening i've
always heard of this concept of straw bale gardening i've never tried it
i was very dubious about whether it would actually work for me
but i had some extra straw bales this year and some extra space and i decided
i'm gonna give it a shot so i did not do this the correct way i didn't follow
the proper instructions for conditioning bales and doing everything by the book
there are a lot of good tutorials out there if you're starting with brand new
fresh straw bales what i did was kind of the lazy way of
straw bale gardening so i had a bunch of straw from
last the end of last summer that i was using to insulate the base of my
greenhouse so as you can imagine those straw bales
sat out exposed to the elements the entire winter so since they had been
weathered quite a bit already and were starting to break down
i did not have to go through the whole conditioning process
what i did was actually take some high nitrogen fertilizer that i had i think
it was just some um gardens alive lawns alive fertilizer
and i just sprinkled that on top of all of the bales
watered that in did that maybe a handful of times
sprinkled a little more fertilizer watered it in over the course of maybe
i don't know two weeks or so and that was it
they were pretty much ready to plant at that point
now another thing we did was to add this cow panel trellis
behind the straw bales and this works both
to kind of hold the straw bales in place and to provide a trellis for any of my
like my tomatoes or my pole beans or any of those vining crops
that may need a little extra support now i tried several different crops and
i did both from seed and from transplant
because i wanted to see what worked really well in this style of
growing so i think one of the big successes has
been the peppers now i've got a shishito and an orange
bell i'll show you in a second here but these have done as well as
anything in my garden i started these from
transplant put the transplants directly into the bales
and i also gave them two supplemental feedings with a food specifically for
peppers after planting so once a transplant
and once about the time they were starting to set fruit
now i also did tomatoes as transplants i did two different varieties in here
and i feel like the tomatoes struggled a little bit
now this was a very bad year for me for disease so that did not help
but i just feel like the tomatoes in the straw bales
did not attain the flavor that i'm used to
from an in-ground tomato tomatoes are definitely doable
but i think they're going to require a little more attention to fertilization
from my end beans have been really really happy
in the straw bales so i did this one which is
willow leaf butter bean kind of like a lima bean for those of you who aren't
familiar with butter beans and i did two flat potted roma type pole
beans and they've all done really well i started them from seed and the bales i
i overcrowded them a bit i think in future i'll i'll do proper spacing with
them but planted from seed gave them a just
all-purpose vegetable fertilizer when they're about a foot or so tall
and other than that they've been left to their own devices and they've just been
really really happy so i think pole beans
i will be doing again in the straw bales the only other crop i did was potatoes
and unfortunately these were planted pretty late and we did get pretty hot
and these guys have just kind of sat out here now the foliage is just now
starting to die down so i'm about ready to pull these out but
i'm not i'm not sure how these are going to do i'll just pull this plant out of
here now and see so
a couple little tubers anything else in there
nope that'd be about it so i know i've seen where other people have had
pretty good success growing their potatoes and straw bales
i think my method needs a little bit of tweaking i need to get these in a little
earlier um but to be honest i probably will not
be doing these in straw bales again so that's it that's the whole harvest
from my straw bales but if you had no other alternative and you
really wanted potatoes you can get a few potatoes from the
straw bales and i'm sure i would have gotten a few more had i
done everything correct with these so as i mentioned i pulled a tomato out
of here and i'm actually going to start putting some fall crops in
as the summer crops come out i'm doing some cabbage
excuse the sad little seedlings here the cabbage worms have gotten to them
already but basically when i planted i just used my hand hoe
made a little divot in the straw put my seedling transplant in give it a
little dose of food and then
firm that straw around the base so i'm doing three cabbages in here
with my peppers i did two plants per bale and my tomatoes i did one plant per
bale and that seemed to be pretty good
spacing we'll see how these cabbages work out
that might be a little tight i might be better with two but this is an
experiment so and my final step is just to water
water water water always watering and you definitely want to be more diligent
about the watering as these guys are getting established
just like you would with your in-ground garden
and with my seed as i mentioned the first time i did it i did them a little
too tight you should really just space them as per
the seed packet or how you would normally space them in the garden
but just again come along kind of loosen a spot in that straw bale
poke that seed down in there
and then i like to just kind of bring some straw down over the top to
cover and kind of firm them down in there
and again water and i'm still kind of amazed by this because
to my mind it just does not seem like this should work
but they grow now i will say the straw bale garden has been really easy as far
as maintenance no weeds is easy to pick the one thing to keep in mind is that it
does require watering i was a little worried about how often i
was going to have to be watering but i'm finding that it's no more
frequently than my stuff that i'm growing in regular containers so
when it's really really hot and dry that's about once
every other day earlier in the year when we were getting rain
i was maybe having the water once a week but it's just
like in-ground growing where if you stick your fingers a couple inches down
to the bale and it's dry you gotta water so i was watering by
hand the easiest thing that i can figure if
you're gonna do this is either situate it
very very close to your garden hose or get some of that irrigation line
just stick a few stakes in your bales and be able to turn the whole thing on
and water it all at once that would make this system just about
as low maintenance as you could possibly get now obviously i
have a lot of room for in-ground traditional growing i don't need to do a
straw bale garden i will probably continue to do this as i
have the bails available just because it is a very easy way to
grow this was great for this particular area because this is very low
and wet and i have trouble doing in ground right here
and also as the straw decomposes i can add this to the compost pile
it rots it it's a great source of organic matter
so this straw will be used continually in a cycle
to contribute to my overall garden health and i would love to hear from you
have you done a straw bale garden before how has it worked
are there things that you would do differently or tips that you can suggest
or will you plan to do a straw bale garden in the future
drop a line in the comments below and let me know and if you find content like
this helpful please consider subscribing to my channel
growfully with jenna thanks for watching and i'll see you next time