Hay Bale Gardens?

[herbsherbsflowers]

I'm trying this for the first time in a frame that I built for raised bed but had not gotten filled. This will do that for me. I have made a couple of pictures and will put more on soon. So far, for the first week, I have just been watering the bales and I used blood meal instead of ammonium nitrate. I really don't like using chemical fertilizers. I'm going to put another round of blood meal on it. I'm going to do that one more week and then put miracle gro organic garden soil on top and plant bush green beans and squash. We'll see how it goes.

 

[ironimagery]

Can the straw bales also be buried and still be effective? I think I'm going to have to research this more. It looks useful for what I'm needing.

I would think the bales would do fine buried and maybe even better since you would have more ground contact. However I see 2 reasons not to bury them. One is the work to dig the hole unless you are one of us lucky ones who has equipment to dig with and the other is the main reason I did these, easy raised beds so my disabled wife can tend garden too.

 

[karanleaf]

Well I finally got a start on my straw bale gardening. It has been raining today but it broke about 4pm. So off to the duck shed I went with extra bailing twine in hand. Took 2 bales restrung them and got them wheel borrowed to the garden area. And here is how they came out.
1st I put down several layers of newspaper then the feed sacks. The bales and proceeded to make room for soil and Asparagus been starts.

I started running twine from the bale to the lattce for the bean vines to grow to.

The flower pots are there to help keep the feed sacks from going anywhere. It is raining again now, so wet feed sacks don't go very far. Here is with all the twine done.


There are 10 bean plants per bale. :watering :tools
I am please how it looks so far. :coolsun

:happy_flower Karan