Straw Bale Garden at Animal Aunts HQ Day 1

22nd February 2013 by Gillie McNicol

I was introduced to the idea of Straw Bale Gardening by a friend and started to look into it. I read a nice article here and had a look at lots of photos on the net, and decided to give it a go!

So yesterday, 8 bales of straw were delivered and I set them up on their sides in two separate very sunny spots in the veggie patch. I am keeping one bale aside to protect the early potatoes so set five together with a couple of heavy pots at each end of one row. I will get a couple of posts dug into the ends of the other bales so we can make some plant supports and to keep them from falling apart if the strings break. Two other bales are end to end a bit nearer to the pond which we put two years ago.

I have laid the bales on top of a water permeable membrane and will cover the edges with some woodchip. One of the water barrels was leaning against the greenhouse a bit, so pumped that out onto the straw giving it all a good soaking.

I wonder if it will work. Last year was such a dreadful year for growing, so I feel anything is worth a go and it doesn’t cost much to buy the bales so watch this space! The next three weeks are conditioning weeks, I have a bit of worm juice from a worm farm I made last year having read about it in a fun book called Growing Stuff bought from The Natural Gardener which has a fabulous array of natural growing products. I also have some dregs of Comfrey tea to pour on the bales, to really get it going, methinks they are a bit out in the open for Human Liquid Motivator Number 1 !
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