Straw Bale Gardening

Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow?
With bales of straw set up high and sheets that are aglow!

Have you ever heard of straw bale gardening? No? Well, sit back, relax and let me tell you all about it!

You remember, of course, that I live in the Wild West. I live in the dry part. About 2/3 of our days are sunny and more days than I care to mention reach 100+ degrees! Watering a garden enough to keep plants alive and producing through that kind of heat is not only difficult, but also expensive. Another downfall to gardening on a small scale here is that much of the ‘topsoil’ is mostly clay and is hard to work in. All that said, I’ve wanted a garden for the 10 years we’ve been married, but just haven’t been able to commit to that kind of work . . .

. . . that is until last fall when my mom mentioned an article in one of the newsletters they receive up on the farm. It discussed straw bale gardening. I jumped at the idea of being able to grow plants without having to dig up my back yard and use less water.

I began with a Google search and found this site , this site and this site. The first week in November I had my husband bring home two pallets and three bales of wheat straw. We receive flood irrigation every other week so I set the pallets on railroad ties to keep the bales out of the water. This is what I came up with:

Things were going great until it started dipping into the mid-30s at night. So, I came up with this:

Then, when the temps. began hovering down around the 30 degree mark, I added a string of Christmas lights under the cover to add a little heat. Here’s a blurry shot of my ‘glowing garden’!

I wanted to go as natural/organic as possible, so I used blood meal and an all purpose organic fertilizer as opposed to the chemical fertilizers mentioned in the links above. The blood meal worked great to break down the straw, but it attracted a lot of flies! I have this set up well away from the house, so it wasn't a problem for me, but it is definitely something to consider.

I applied 1 c. blood meal every other day for the first four days, then cut to 1/2 c. blood meal every other to every third day for the next 10 days. I watered well with a sprinkler every other day until the days dropped into the 60's and I got my plants in. Then I skipped to watering once every five days or so. When I planted, I added a 10-10-10 organic fertilizer. I fertilized again about a month after planting and am now watering only once every 7-10 days. Two of my tomatoes froze the night after Christmas (I forgot to cover them!), but otherwise everything is doing well!

Here's how I went about planting. I found that a flat tined hand fork worked great to create a gap in the straw.

I worked it in pretty deep.






Then I used a bent tined fork to dig out some of the straw from the gap.

I followed the planting instructions on these little peat pots and heaped the loose straw around the base of the stem. Notice the extremely attractive gardening visor in the background? It got in the way of the camera, but I think it rally adds a sense of authenticity to the photo, don't you?

If you have trouble digging and bending, are short on space, or just plain unmotivated to dig and bend, you might just want to try straw bale gardening. Let me know how it goes!