Straw Bale Garden - Tips?

For next year, I am planning on making use of some poorer quality area of my property through creating a straw bale garden. Currently I am in the planning phase, but am itching for spring to be here to get hands on.

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I have read up on the mechanics of the process and how to create them but I was wondering if anyone has some hands on experience that could share their experiences.



Anything to look out for? Did the garden's performance meet your expectations?

Thank you in advance!

We tried it one year and didn't have much luck. We had a hard time keeping the bale wet. If I were to try again I would give it a long soak it in a slurry of compost and soil first.

You get 2.5x more rainfall than we do. I think that will make a big difference.

I have never done a straw bale garden so I am looking forward to learning about your results.

I feel it would be a good experiment if some of the plants were transplants with soil and some would be seeds with some compost.

Maybe you can still find some Thanksgiving decos that used straw bales.

Or maybe some nativity scenes that used the straw bale

Hay bales might produce too many weed seeds.

Timothy Norton wrote:For next year, I am planning on making use of some poorer quality area of my property through creating a straw bale garden. Currently I am in the planning phase, but am itching for spring to be here to get hands on.

(Source)

I have read up on the mechanics of the process and how to create them but I was wondering if anyone has some hands on experience that could share their experiences.

Anything to look out for? Did the garden's performance meet your expectations?

Thank you in advance!

There is this book Marvelous Abudance and they did the old Parisian market garden of heaping fresh manure and surrounding it with bales and planting into the bales. They had great success, if my memory serves me right. Paris did, over a hundred years prior. Hotbed method.
Also I have read that getting your hay far in advance and letting it rot will kill off the weed seed, leaving you with a tight bound moveable-plantable compost. Reminds me of the Ruth Stout method too, which I have had work for us.

The most important thing is to make sure the straw bales are free of broadleaf "growth regulators". It is a common problem nowadays as farmer are using stronger and more persistent products. Although you can do a bean bioassay to test before planting, it's even better to make sure the toxic stuff doesn't even reach your property. Buy from a reliable source if possible.

May Lotito wrote:The most important thing is to make sure the straw bales are free of broadleaf "growth regulators". It is a common problem nowadays as farmer are using stronger and more persistent products. Although you can do a bean bioassay to test before planting, it's even better to make sure the toxic stuff doesn't even reach your property. Buy from a reliable source if possible.

True. Though if it's free straw (from grain) then who knows what the source is -- my "reducer" method is a long soak in water with soil and compost thrown in. So far this has dealt adequately with the usual suspects. Hay is potentially more risky (pesky persistents).

I did the straw bale method on rented property where I couldn't build a hugel.
I did 2 batches started around a month apart.
The more decayed bales gave MUCH better results.
I'd say go get your bales ASAP and work on the decay process every day it's above freezing.
We grew tomatoes, cucumbers, honey dew, and some herbs.  Carrots didn't do very well for me.
We were living near the Kansas-Oklahoma border at the time.

I made a 10x20 bed of spoiled hay that had been left out two winters, so it was falling out of bale form. In some places it's nice neat bales side-by-side and in others it's more piles. I got a late start -- building it on July 1st with a hard freeze on October 5th. I got a lot of winter squash that grew outside the bounds of the bed, and a fair amount of potatoes, and we ate some brassica greens. It was a weird (terrible) year in the garden in general, and this was really pretty productive given all the other factors. Starting it early and having normal weather would help a lot. It probably does need to be watered even where I live, which has abundant rain compared to a lot of Permies.

I was fortunate enough to get some chemical free straw bales this fall.  
I put them around the base of my chicken coop, it is raised so the bales act as a wind break and the chickens do poop on them a lot.  In the spring the bales go to the garden.
Done this for 3 years now and the straw works great in the gardens.
I did try growing things in the bales a few years ago with limited success.  I don't think I let the bales compost enough before planting in them.

Ha!  When I saw this topic I didn't even realize that growing things IN straw bales was that much of a thing, aside from potatoes.  I was going to tell about my experience, which I will anyway, but it is not the same thing at all.

One year I had a melon vine growing, but fall was upon us and two nice looking young melons had yet to ripen.  I took six square bales and set them in a rectangle perimeter around the vine and unripe melons.  I covered the top with an old large window I found in my pole barn that had been left there by the previous owner.  I would completely cover the opening at night and angle it to various degrees during the days depending on how sunny it was.  It kept the frost-susceptible plant from dying for a few weeks after the first frost, and allowed one of the two melons to ripen before it got too cold for the single pane window to keep out the cold at night.  So I've only used bales for insulation.  I scatter straw in the form of used chicken bedding over garden areas in winter to decompose before planting time, but that's the extent of my "straw bale gardening" experience.  

For conditioning straw bales, I am planning on generally following the process that this gentleman has done.



The bales I will utilize next year will have some winter weathering to them, hopefully that will jumpstart the breakdown process a bit. I've actually tucked some leftover mushroom spawn that I had on the bottom of the bales between the straw and some woodchip.

Soil scientist Dr Redhawk has some things to say about straw bale gardening here.

I’ve tried this, and it’s a fantastic way to use in poorer quality soil areas! But the problem is it gets dry quickly. Straw drains quickly, You’ll need to water often.

I'm cleaning out old tabs that I haven't done anything with and found this one on straw bale gardening: https://www.strawbalegardenclub.com/

Christopher Weeks wrote:I'm cleaning out old tabs that I haven't done anything with and found this one on straw bale gardening: https://www.strawbalegardenclub.com/

XD  So glad to see that I'm not the only one who allows them to accumulate like that!