This Week's Podcast: A Rebroadcast: Straw Bale Vegetable Gardening with Joel Karsten
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This
week’s guest is Joel Karsten who is an evangelical advocate for straw bale
gardening. He has been experimenting
with growing vegetables — not in the ground, raised beds or containers — but
in straw bales. He has around 20 on his residential lot near Minneapolis where
the existing soil isn’t great.
He buys bales of straw, about 48” long x 24” tall and
18”wide. Then he goes through a process of conditioning beginning by completely
saturating the bales with water. He adds nitrogen in any form, for example,
well-rotted chicken manure, washes that into the straw, and continues to
hydrate them for about 10 to 12 days.
The bales begin to decompose, and that’s the idea. The
temperature inside the bales can reach 90 degrees F or higher.
Joel drives tall stakes into the ground at either end
of the bales and attaches wires to them at different heights to cross over the
length of the bales. The wires will support indeterminate tomatoes, cucumbers,
beans and other tall crops. In early spring, he can also spread plastic film
over the lowest wires and the sides of the bales to make a greenhouse tent to
keep the warmth in and get a two to three week jump on spring, and perhaps get
to plant second crops later in the season.
This month, Joel’s new book, Straw Bale Gardens:
The Breakthrough Method for Growing Vegetables Anywhere, Earlier and with No
Weeding on the
topic will be published. Learn more about this innovative technique:
strawbalegardens.com.
This looks doable and makes sense for my shallow soil.
I tried two bails last year here in central/eastern Florida. I got tomatoes …and herbs to do well in them. Even had one tomato plant seed itself.