Strawbale Gardening - no weeding, no hoeing, no tilling

Mr. Strawbaleman, you've inspired us to try strawbales in addition to our raised vegetable beds. We used bone meal because we already had it. By Wednesday, we should be able to put plants in the bales. How many squash plants can we put in each bale? Would you recommend transfering our Kentucky Wonder beans to a bale or leaving it in the raised bed? Do "100"s cherry tomatoes need to be staked? Oh, how do you think watermelons would do in a bale? We haven't planted our seedlings yet? Sorry for so many questions but We haven't found anyone with experience with bale gardening. Any advice would be greatlly appreciated. Can't wait to see the results! Have a great day and thanks so much for introducing us to the idea!

 

That just looks like a whole bunch of work

 

Bluewillow: more than 2 hills of squash/bale will get kind of crowded. Most hills have 2 squash plants each.

If you already have something established in your raised bed, I'd leave it there, but feel free to relocate the beans to the bales if you want to try.

At www.davesgarden.com, Vegetabale garden section, Straw bale gardening (Part 11) thread, someone just posted a nice photo of their running beans on a fence. (davesgarden charges a small fee to access this, but it's the Rolls Royce of internet garden sites; well worth the fee.)

Re: the cherry tomatoes, I haven't grown them, but anything that doesn't run or you don't want to flop over will have to be staked or tied up in some way. My daddy let's his tomatoes grow up and then they'll flop over and run over the sides of the bales. I prefer everything up unless it's cukes, or, as you mentioned, watermelons which should do nicely from bales, too.

Be sure to take a photo of your bale garden and share it with us.

Kent

 

harleygirl: My bale gardening motto is "No weeding, no hoeing, no tilling". All 3 of those are involved in a typical dirt garden - all summer long through frost.

Setting the bales up doesn't take much effort.

The initial prep work involves sprinkling out a little nitrate or equivalent and watering it in the bales.

Buy your plants and transplant into the bales. Easy job.

Water each day for the first little bit and then monitor. Easy, stand up job.

Moe any grass around the bales during your regular yard mowing.

Give your bales a haircut once in awhile if you like. "A little off the top, please." Not a bad job.

You will have some work if you put up a trellis for tomatoes, but that's not too bad considering the benefits of all those good, fresh, easy-to-pick tomatoes.

Is bale gardening for everyone? Certainly not.

Is it alot of work to do? Nope.

Have I received testimonial after testimonial from those who had poor soils or poor health and had given up gardening until they tried this method? You betcha!

It'll bring tears to your eyes to read some of the handwritten letters and emails testifying how folks have "received a new lease on life" and have a reason to get up in the morning now that they can renew their passion for gardening and growing their own vegetables again.

It's something relatively new, and I'm still learning and trying new stuff in my 3rd year.

Next year I'm trying some corn with some sort of support/trellis system, just to see how that fares.

No way all of this fun can be work!

Come on in and join the fun. We'd love to have you bale gardening with us.

Kent

 

Just some of the cukes I picked last year during my 1st picking. These cukes are from the photo that Bluewillow copied in her previous inquiry.

My Bride put up over 100 jars of pickles over the course of the summer plus we gave away alot to family and friends.

The "hard work" is deciding what to do with all the produce you get from bale gardening!!

Kent

 

Thanks so much for your quick response! This is the first time that we've tried a raised bed for a vegetable garden and so far everything is looking great. The strawbales seem to have even more advantages. No removing sod, digging, building sides for bed, etc. I'll try to figure how to post pictures if we have anything to show. My experience with gardening is there's a lot of variables that I have no control over. So wish me luck! Oh, and Harleygirl, I'm a native NC girl with grandparents who farmed. Summers with them were a lot of work. Picking and shelling butterbeans was the worst!!! Sorry for the long post! This is one reason I don't post much, I have a tendency to talk fast and sometimes probably too much! Anyway, thanks and have a good evening!

 

We had a garden growing up, mom canned EVERYTHING! :lol:

I don't have time for that right now, but I do want a garden when we move.

Now if I could plant my own tobacco and smoke it... I may be on to something!

 

Latest shot of 2 rows of tomatoes. Doing well. Almost tall enough to start tying them up.

(At www.davesgarden.com, Straw Bale Garden thread (Part 11) http://davesgarden.com/forums/t/718768/ is a great shot of tomatoes and cantelopes growing in bermuda grass hay. You have to be a paid subscriber, which isn't much, to view all the photos. This site is the Rolls Royce of internet gardening sites.)

Kent

 

Potatoes, cukes in the back starting to run a little, squash and zucchini in the far left.

No potato bugs or any other pests so far.

Kent

 

This morning I planted some squash and cucumbers in the bales. The squash looked good this evening but the cukes are looking wilted. I hope tomorrow that they have recovered. First time planting cukes, is this normal, you think? I'm going to buy more bales tomorrow and start the process again.

 

Bluewillow: a good rule of thumb is transplant after sunset so the plants will have overnight to "settle in" before tackling the heat of the day.

The cukes should bounce back.

Young squash will also tend to droop after a hot day but recover especially after you water at the end of the day.

Kent

 

Thanks! This morning everything looks great and it's raining here! My godfather used to tell me that rain was "magic". I think he's right because my plants always look better after rain, it seems tap water just isn't the same. I am getting a little carried away, I've bought more plants! My better half is amused but a little skeptical. So far, though, he's really impressed with the raised beds and the bales. This morning, a little green tomato has appeared. Anyway, thanks so much for your help and happy gardening!

 

Here's a link for an interesting article about growing veggies in containers of different material including old sawdust, which I want to try next year.

http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/VH032

This article was posted in the Tomato forum of www.davesgarden.com, which I can't say enough about when it comes to gardening-type info, discussions, etc.

Since bale gardening is nothing more than using wheat/oat straw, hay, etc, as raised organic beds, some of the info in this article is useful, especially where it talks about fertilizing and how we have to modify our way of watering and feeding our plants as compared to "dirt" farming.

My squash and zucchini plants are blooming well with little squash already forming. So it looks like I'll be eating some fried squash soon.

I'd better make sure I have some House of Autry breader mix to fry those puppies in!

Can't wait for my first home-grown tomato sandwich!

But I'll have some fried green tomatoes first. Yum Yum!

Kent

 

I recently found the 2 articles from The Decatur Daily News of Decatur, Alabama, that introduced me to, and ignited my fascination, to bale gardening in the winter of 2004.

The articles are no longer part of the paper's archives, but I just wanted to share them with you. The two subjects in the stories are both elderly.

7/12/2003 - Tomatoes flourishing in hay - Hartselle woman expanding garden after surprising success, by Jim Lawley, Daily Staff Writer

"Dean Rainey of Hartselle tried it last year with three bales of hay. It worked so well that this vegetable-growing season, she’s using five.

Now 10 tomato plants and one zucchini plant stand tall and bountiful in square bales of hay in Rainey’s back yard near her patio.

The simplicity and uniqueness of bedding hand-size plants in the hay bales and watching them flourish “is amazing to me,” Rainey said.

When told about her feat, Morgan County Cooperative Extension System agent Ronald Britnell said, “I’ve never heard of people doing it. But it doesn’t surprise me. The plants are growing in organic matter that’s decaying.”

Britnell said he’s seen some people use buckets to grow tomatoes, plant them in cattle manure piles and plant them upside down so that “the tomatoes are hanging down off the vine.”

“People grow tomatoes all sorts of ways,” he said.

Rainey said her tomato plants last year yielded about two bushels of tomatoes. The ones that the family didn’t eat were given away to friends and neighbors or canned for the winter, she said.

She learned of the technique from a friend, Billy Chenault of Hartselle, who walks with her for exercise.

When her daughter, Judy Williams, a nurse at Decatur General West, told co-workers about the plants, they didn’t believe her until she brought pictures and gave them some of the tomatoes, she said.

“Now, they say they’re going to try it,” Williams said. “People are talking about it, and the word is spreading.”

Rainey said, “Even our pastor at First Assembly of God in Hartselle, Jess White, had to come by and see it for himself.”

She suggests planting two tomato plants per bale and keeping the bales moist, watering them every other day. Adding Miracle-Gro helps, but isn’t necessary. As the plants grow taller, place stakes in the bales, just as you would when growing tomatoes in soil.

The bales slowly deteriorate, and there’s little left of them by the end of growing season, she said.

“Next year, we might try squash or something else, too,” Rainey said.


7/20/04 – Gardening by the Bale – Templeton gets bumper crop in straw, by Patrice Stewart, Daily Staff Writer.

Jim Templeton planted his garden in bales of wheat straw this year, and then sat back and watched it grow like crazy.

He followed the plan in an old newspaper clipping a friend gave him, using ammonium nitrate and a mixture of topsoil and manure, and has had a bumper crop of squash, tomatoes, onions and crowder peas. (The plan he mentions is the recipe I posted in the beginning. – KR)

At this point in the summer, he’s watching the watermelons ripen on and around the bales in his garden along the alley behind his house on Eighth Street Southeast. His bale garden attracted interest during the Albany district garden tour in May, when he distributed copies of the directions, but it’s matured and produced a lot since then.

“This is the most fun I’ve ever had,” Templeton said. “I’ve virtually abandoned it now, except to walk out and gather what has ripened.”

He planted several varieties of tomatoes, including Mr. Stripey and German Pinks. “I could eat tomatoes 24 hours a day – I like the low-acid pink type, the big beefsteak tomatoes, on my breakfast plate.” He quit staking his tomatoes when they got too high, but they continued to produce.

“That fertilizer really turned on the tomatoes; I’ve never had a tomato crop like this,” said Templeton, who plans to garden this way again next year.

He and his wife, Margaret Ann, ate all of their small white onions and wanted to plant more but couldn’t find any in town.

“We finally pulled up the squash because it was bearing so heavy and running all over the bales. And then we planted crowder peas, and they’re taking over any space the watermelon left.”

He’s also growing peppers, okra, cucumbers and several herbs, but not all of them are planted in the wheat straw.

Templeton figured he’d fancy his garden up a bit, too. “I stuck a few petunias in the cracks between the 20 or so bales, and the bales looked real pretty when I first set them out in three rows,” he said.

“I did everything like the directions said, except I added a small can of fishing worms per bale.”

He found bales of wheat straw (recommended over hay for the best results) at a local garden and landscape supply and bought a commercial 50-50 mix of topsoil and compost.

(I don’t know what they’re basing the straw –vs- hay comment on. Anecdotes from other bale gardeners say they are having good success with hay, too. - Kent)

His wife said they might have planted too much, not realizing how well it would grow. “But I was so hungry for something fresh when I started this, and I’ve really been flabbergasted at how it’s taken off,” Templeton said. He said he wouldn’t have dared any extra fertilizer, or the plants would really have gotten out of control.

Kent

 

A few headlines I've seen since I've started "preaching" bale gardening across the USA:

"Sleeper Cells of Bale Gardeners Across USA Surprises Homeland Security - Al Gore claims heat from bales adding to Global Warming"

"Bob Woodward to ink new book - cited confidential source named "Deep Straw" who will expose Bale Gardeners as "just a bunch of folks who love gardening"."

Some of the slogans some of us have come up with:

"Having a Bale of a Time!"

"The Farmer in the Bale"

"Bale Gardener - USA"

"Dirt? Bale Gardeners Don't Need No Steenkin' Dirt!"

"Got Bales?"

"I garden therefore I bale"

"Eat well from a bale"

"Bale gardeners do it in the straw!"

Kent

 

A link to a great poem called The Gardeners Prayer:

http://www.poofcat.com/pray18.html

Kent

 

Potatoes doing well. Blooming nicely now. Now let's see if we can get some potatoes growing in that straw. No sign of any potato bugs, either.

Kent

 

Nothing like fresh peppers with your meal!

Kent

 

One of my tomato rows. Tomorrow I'll go through them and sucker them again. Lots of blooms already.

Kent

 

Zucchini doing well. Lots of blooms on these, too.

Kent