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    How to Build a Straw Bale Garden

    mudra
    mudra


    Posts : 23196
    Join date : 2010-04-09
    Age : 69
    Location : belgium

    How to Build a Straw Bale Garden Empty How to Build a Straw Bale Garden

    Post  mudra Mon Feb 09, 2015 3:35 pm

    How to Build a Straw Bale Garden

    How to Build a Straw Bale Garden Hay-bale-hero
    When I moved into my new Philadelphia rowhouse, I was determined to grow the vegetable garden that had eluded me all those years in a cramped Manhattan apartment. But reality struck with the first thrust of my shovel: my soil — a cocktail of concrete shards and construction debris mixed with a bit of sand and dirt — was useless.
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    Faced with the expense (OK, and effort) of building raised beds, I decided instead to go cheap and easy: a straw bale garden. So I called up Joel Karsten, author of Straw Bale Gardens, and lead authority on all things straw.
    Karsten argues that straw is an ideal “container” for growing vegetables. “The hollow tubes are designed by Mother Nature to suck up and hold moisture,” he told me. And as the insides of the bales decompose, they provide a rich medium for vegetable growth.
    You can put together a straw bale garden right on your lawn, your driveway (oh yes, your neighbors will love you) or anywhere that gets at least six to eight hours of sun. It’s especially good for growers who live in northern climes with shorter growing seasons — the bales heat up much quicker than soil, stimulating early-season root growth.
    Here’s the method that has made Karsten the go-to guru for straw bale gardening:
    How to Build a Straw Bale Garden Step-1-resized
    1. Source your straw
    You can toss the dice like I did and purchase straw bales from your local garden center, but it’s best to source them direct from the farm. If you want to garden organically, the person at the garden center won’t likely know how the straw was grown. To help connect farmers with growers, Karsten has set up a user-generated marketplace, but it’s still too small to be useful to most gardeners. Remember, straw is easiest to come by in the fall. If you arrange your straw bale garden before the winter, you’ll be all set to plant when springtime comes.
    How to Build a Straw Bale Garden Step-2-resized
    2. Position your bales
    Before you set up your bales, lay down landscape fabric to prevent weeds from growing up through the bales. Arrange the bales side by side in rows, with their cut sides up. The strings that bind the bales should run across the sides, not across the planting surface. The strings will help keep the shape of the bales as they start to soften and decompose.
    How to Build a Straw Bale Garden Step-3-resized
    3. Condition the bales
    Two weeks before you plant, you have to get the bales cooking. This means wetting and fertilizing the bales for roughly 10 days to start composting the inner straw. For the first six days, put down 3 cups of organic fertilizer per bale every other day, and water the bales to push the fertilizer down and thoroughly saturate the straw. On the off days, simply water the bales. (Tip: try to ignore the neighbors staring suspiciously from their windows.) Days 7 through 9, lay down 1.5 cups of organic fertilizer each day and water. Day 10 put down 3 cups with phosphorus and potassium (bone or fish meal mixed with 50% wood ash works like a charm).
    If you stick your finger into your bales, they’ll be hot and moist. You’ll start to see some “peppering” — black soil-like clumps that signal the beginning of the composting that will continue through the growing season. If mushrooms sprout up, rejoice — they won’t harm your plants; it means the straw is decomposing as it should.
    How to Build a Straw Bale Garden Step-4-resized


    read on: Arrow http://modernfarmer.com/2013/07/straw-bale-gardening/

    Love Always
    mudra
    B.B.Baghor
    B.B.Baghor


    Posts : 1851
    Join date : 2014-01-31
    Age : 73
    Location : Druid county UK

    How to Build a Straw Bale Garden Empty Re: How to Build a Straw Bale Garden

    Post  B.B.Baghor Tue Feb 17, 2015 12:39 pm

    Thank you, mudra, for this post, I can imagine how this works well,
    as long as there are no.... mice around. These rascals loooooove strawbales,
    specially when there's cabbages growing in them Wink

    How to Build a Straw Bale Garden Naamlo11
    But with a cat around, nothing will go wrong... except maybe feeling disgust for the cat-ching of mice Bleh

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