Great Straw Bale experiment

Earlier this year, before talk of a drought, I had read about using straw bales for planting veggies and decided I would perform an experiment. I’d use a straw bale to grow a couple of tomato plants and then use my regular half oak barrel planter for another two tomatoes and see what happened.

As it turns out there were two initial hurdles to this plan. The first being that a friend kept going on and on about how water intensive straw bale gardening was. Since we are in a drought I was a bit hesitant about going forward with the straw bale but then decided to go ahead thinking I’d use grey water to water them. The grey water turned out to be a problem for a variety of reasons but by then I’d already started conditioning my bales. What I’ve discovered is that, except for the initial conditioning of the bales, I use no more water to water the bales than I do to water the plants in the oak barrel. I think I may even use slightly less as the bale tends to hold on to the water on the inside. Fortunately I had also started conditioning the bales and then, huzzah, we had a week worth of rain so ended up using less water than anticipated.

The second hurdle turned out to be my own inability to read. I went out and got two hay bales instead of two straw bales and I panicked. The hay bales did take longer to heat up initially and I do still occasionally see small sprouts of live hay along the sides but for the most part the hay bales have rotted nicely. I used the second hay bales to plant Thai and sweet basils and they’ve gone to town. The most exciting results are in the tomato department though. I have over twenty tomatoes on the hay bale tomatoes and zero on the tomatoes in the half barrels. There may be a slight skewing of the results in that my S.O. Forgot to bore drainage holes in the barrel and, for a while, the tomatoes were drowning, That has been fixed and the tomatoes have made a comeback so it will be interested to see what the final yield will be between the two types of containers. Personally my money is on the hay bales and I’ll def. be using this method to plant next year.