With tightly crossed fingers, I can say that the risk of frost is officially gone in the Frozen Tundra! What does that mean? It’s gardening time!!! As you may know, straw bale gardening is my favorite way to grow herbs and vegetables. We did it last year, and we’re doing it again this year! And as promised, I’m going to lay out the steps of straw bale gardening in detail on my blog, so that we can garden together!

If you haven’t started your garden yet, the first thing you need to do is easy: Get some straw bales.

At a farm, off Craigslist or at your local nursery or garden store, straw bales shouldn’t be hard to come by. But get straw. Not hay.

Start with one or two bales if you’re a novice, five if you feel ambitious and go ahead and get ten or twenty if you want a huge garden. We’re going to plant in our old bales this year as well as in a whole smattering of new ones. Place your bales where you want them. They should be in full sun and not closer than five feet to your house or garage. Once you have your bales, water them right away.

All told, it will take about 10-12 days for the bales to be ready for planting. You will water and fertilize your bales for a week and a half or so before planing. Yes, with straw bale gardening, you don’t need dirt or even a yard of any kind. There is virtually no weeding or bending over. After your bales are ready, you’ll be planting seeds and/or seedlings right in the decomposing straw instead of in dirt!

Once your bales are in place, just water them a lot for a few days straight. Each bale weighs about 50 pounds dry, and when each one is done being soaked with water each time, it should weigh about 150 pounds. You can also reuse your bales from last year! They are rich with nutrients and the decomposed bales can be planted in once more! We’re doing that with our five bales from last year, plus adding more new ones.

Start to water your old bales from last year each day, just like your new ones.

They won’t need attention for a week and a half, though. This old bale from last year already has beans planted in it.

After you are sure your new bales are really wet, after say a couple of days of watering, then for about a week and half begin to alternate days of watering the bales with days of just fertilizing them. One day fertilizing, one day watering. You can buy organic fertilizer or use safe cow dung if you have access to it! The key is to get nutrients built up in the bales. Nitrogen is very important, so look for that in whatever fertilizer you use. After almost two weeks of this, your bales will be ready for planting!

If you have anything that needs to be transplanted, now is the time to do it! We moved some raspberry plants to be near our straw bales the other day. Be sure to water newly transplanted plants very, very well or they will croak!

So that’s all there is to it for step 1. Still don’t understand exactly how straw bale gardening works? Just keep watching my blog. As our garden unfolds, it will make more sense. Like the idea but not sure it’s really for you? Read over these reasons why we love straw bale gardening more than gardening directly in the dirt. Maybe I’ll make a believer out of you!

1. Getting children to be hands on with the gardening process teaches them in a first hand way where food really comes from (in other words, that the people at the grocery store aren’t the ones who actually make food).

2. There is virtually no weeding at all with straw bale gardens.

3. When children can plant, water and pick their own veggies and fruit, they seem much more apt to want to eat those for a snack as opposed to Goldfish or fruit chews.

4. There isn’t as much bending, kneeling and squatting with straw bale gardening.

5. The height makes it very easy for children to get up close from all angles and really see the goodies growing. Straw bales also keep a garden out of the way more, so that children, pets and pedestrians are less likely to trample the plants.

6. The straw holds moisture well and uses water more efficiently, meaning that you need to use less.

7. There is no need to till the ground.

8. With straw bales, you can garden even if you have terrible soil…or no soil at all! You can even plant one (or more!) on your deck!

9. Where space is an issue, you can plant a lot more food while not taking up as much ground space (since you can plant in the sides of the bales, too).

10. This fun and unique way of gardening gives you a way to feed fresh, organic produce to your family, available all summer long right outside your door, without having to spend an arm and a leg on the organic stuff at the store.

Did I convince you? Let me know if you’re going to be doing a straw bale garden, big or small, along with me this summer!

Green pepper. (I think this is a hot one, and I’m guessing it may change color.)

Green thumb. (Our basil and marigolds are flourishing, even after we’ve totally harvested the veggies from the top of this particular bale.)

Green sunflowers. (We planted these too late, I think.)

Green orange pumpkins.

We have our own little patch this year!!

Our backyard has four pumpkins doing really well, with some smaller ones in sight, too! All within the view from our living room window.

How did I grow pumpkins? I just planted a few pumpkin seeds in the side of one of the bales. A bunch of vines started to grow. I thinned them out so there were just three pumpkin plants there, all coming out of the (short, end) side of one bale. They have grown and spread out away from the bales. My husband has to carefully mow around them each time, and all three are still getting longer each day!

Green tomato. (Huge!)

Green (Five of them!) straw bales. We have harvested lots of yummy goodness out of our garden this summer and there are still plenty of things coming! It’s like the (Green!) gift that keeps on giving!

Green tomatoes. (Small!)

And as for me? I’m (Finally!) no longer green with envy, drooling over other people’s gardens. Our first year straw bale gardening has been a smashing success. Can we really call ourselves gardeners now!? My husband and I loved it this summer and already have grandiose plans for next year. We’re going to do straw bale gardening again next spring, but on a significantly bigger scale. We’ll arrange things slightly differently and make some other changes to our technique based on what we learned this year. Our plan is also to plant some apple trees!

To see our green garden grow from beginning to end, just click here. Scroll to the bottom of the page to see the oldest posts about exactly how we grew our food in straw.

For someone (Me!) who doesn’t really like the color green, I sure am enjoying seeing so much of it. And we still haven’t had to pull a single weed from our garden!!

Green!

My children.

Remember them? It already feels like it’s been light years since they appeared on my blog. (Although I only just realized today that my husband put up a video of them on his blog recently!) But it’s time to rectify that myself. While I wade through some medical mumbo jumbo here at the hospital, waiting on doctors and procedures and answers for what also seems like light ages, I thought I’d look through photographs of our MSC* and the fruits of their MSH**.

*Many Small Children **Many Small Harvests

Our straw bale garden out back is producing quite the bounty lately! And, while harvest time certainly isn’t as dramatic an experience for five bale gardeners as it is, say, for the farmers we live near, it’s still be a pretty fun time for us.

Our bales have gone from this…

…to this…

…then to this…

…and finally this!

And during the past couple weeks, some harvesting has begun! While we’re a long ways from the carrots, pumpkins and watermelons being ready to pick, there have been peas a plenty!

Our children already liked peapods okay, but when they plant, water, watch and pick their own? We seriously can’t keep enough of them on hand. They go almost as fast as jelly beans do with our children!

Yes, for children, picking their own fruits and veggies brings such joy. And pride. And silly poses, apparently.

Big Mac is still on his I love for you to take my picture because I love coming up with different poses stage. Which I find hysterical; frankly, I hope he doesn’t grow out of it anytime soon.

There is lettuce, cilantro, basil and radishes ready for the picking in our garden these days, too.

Our radishes are particularly zesty, but my husband loves them. And so does Stellan. Seriously! The kid will eat wasabi peas like they are Gerber Cereal Puffs. A radish doesn’t faze him at all.

Anyway, a mid summer assessment of our very first straw bale garden experience (you can click right here to read all about how we grew a garden in straw bales) is that straw bale gardening with children is wonderful!! And, since I get lots of questions about why straw bales instead of dirt, I’ll share with you why we’ve loved it:

1. Getting children to be hands on with the gardening process teaches them in a first hand way where food really comes from (in other words, that the people at the grocery store aren’t the ones who actually make food).

2. There is virtually no weeding at all with straw bale gardens.

3. When children can plant, water and pick their own veggies and fruit, they seem much more apt to want to eat those for a snack as opposed to Goldfish or fruit chews.

4. There isn’t as much bending, kneeling and squatting with straw bale gardening.

5. The height makes it very easy for children to get up close from all angles and really see the goodies growing.

6. Straw bales also keep a garden out of the way more, so that children, pets and pedestrians are less likely to trample the plants.

7. There is no need to till the ground.

8. With straw bales, you can garden even if you have terrible soil…or no soil at all! You can even plant one (or more!) on your deck!

9. Where space is an issue, you can plant a lot more food while not taking up as much ground space (since you can plant in the sides of the bales, too).

10. This fun and unique way of gardening gives you a way to feed fresh, organic produce to your family, available all summer long right outside your door, without having to spend an arm and a leg on the organic stuff at the store.

11. And last but not least, gardening has provided me with some really great photo ops with our little sprouts!

And I now return you to your regularly scheduled programming. Yes, no doubt a kidney stone update is likely to come next. What can I say? It’s my life at the moment. But I sure did enjoy that little journey away from my hospital reality in this post. Did you?

Our five straw bales are growing great guns! Just look how far they’ve come since the last time I showed their progress to you!

If you’re wondering how on earth we prepared and planted a garden in straw bales, you can read all about it right here or by clicking on the straw bale gardening category under my life tab at the top of my blog.

Can you tell what vegetables are starting to make their appearance in our bales? No, I mean seriously. Can you?

Because I can’t. We’ve not gardened much before and I, er, forgot to label what things I planted where. Whoops. I do know that I need to thin out some of the seedlings soon. Whatever those seedlings are.

Oh, well. I like surprises.

And our straw bales, growing great guns, are giving us lots of green surprises.

Preparing our straw bales for this season of gardening wasn’t the fun part. But planting is. So, after (and some before and also during) planting in the sides of our bales, our family got to work on planting on the tops.

It’s important to put your bales the right way up. The open ends of the straw, the little hollows you can see down, should be the top and bottom of your straw bale garden. The part of the bales with the long sides of straw bundled together are the sides. Um, I hope that made sense.

There are a couple of ways to plant the top of your bales. One is with seeds. To do that, you can either set your seeds on top of the bales and then cover with about 1-2 inches of good soil, or you can put 1-2 inches of soil on the bales and press your seeds into it. Either way. Water well, but carefully, the day you plant, and then every day afterwords.

My husband had started to make something for the peas that will be growing in the bale to climb up. He used pieces of bamboo and then green wire, too. Small Fry, whose pants are on backwards you’ll see if you look hard enough, was pointing to “Where the plants are gonna grow.”

Isn’t this straw bale so pretty? Well, I sure think so!

You can also plant seedlings or tomato plants or whatever in the tops of your bales, too. On the ground, you see the peas that my husband has been babying along. If you plant those in the top, you don’t really need to add the extra dirt.

I think that might be Stellan’s head in the foreground. Or some straw. It’s hard to tell. So, that’s how you plant in the tops of your bales! In my next straw bale gardening post, I’ll show you the completed look of our planted bales. Then, we can let the growing begin!!!

Once we were past the threat of overnight freeze, it was time to plant our garden! I have no idea if one is supposed to start with the tops or the sides, but we started with the sides. Remember? We have really no idea what we are doing.

Seeds for pumpkins, squash and watermelon can go in the sides of the bales. So can herbs and annuals. In the sides of our bales, we planted lots of marigolds, some other annual flowers whose name I don’t recall, cilantro, basil and mint.

To plant seeds, you just shove the seed about an inch into the straw and cover with about an inch of soil. To plant annuals and herbs that are already growing, you don’t need to add dirt at all. I found it much easier to get my plants into the sides of our bales when the bales were very wet and so was the soil of the plants.

I eventually was able to do the whole process with just my hands parting the straw, but for a long while I used two wooden (Thanks, NicswifeSarah, for the correction! Of course you are right!) bamboo spoons to help me.

Small Fry helped. We just inserted the spoons and opened up a space in the straw. Using my hands, I made the area a little bigger and deeper.

Then, I stuck the spoons back in, pulled them apart, shoved the plant in as deep as I could…

…pulled out the spoons…

…shoved the dirt and the plant snugly into the straw and called it good. Make sure to water your garden again very well the day you plant.

I ended up getting about 24 plants into all four sides of each of our bales. They look super nice and I had lovely snacks of basil, mint and cilantro along the way.

In my next straw bale post? Planting in the tops of the bales. And pictures of the completey planted garden coming soon, too!

So, the weather will be warming up here in the Frozen Tundra by this weekend. It’s almost time to plant our garden in our straw bales!

As you’ve seen in my other posts (under my tab titled life you can find my straw bale gardening link to read all my posts so far), one of the first things we needed to do to get our straw bale garden ready was to water and fertilize our bales. Check!

Next, we started getting our plants and seeds ready. My husband planted a bunch of our seeds into seedling containers. I think these are our snap peas, but I could be wrong.

We also bought some annuals. Did you know you can plant these in the sides of the bales? (And, according to my friend Carrie, you can also plant potatoes under your bales!!)

Instead of growing these from seeds, we just got our annuals at the garden store. We went with lots of marigolds because their smell can keep away garden eating creatures.

For right now, our plants are all sitting on our deck. We bring them in at night if there is the threat of frost. Yes, it can still freeze at night here in May!

I’m super excited about our basil and cilantro. Those can be planted in the sides of the bales, too. I’m so excited to get this show on the road and start planting in our straw bales soon!!!