My attempt at (straw bale) gardening...

For some reason, the need to garden is deeply rooted (pun intended) in me. Maybe it's the frozen veggies that sit in my freezer for years or the waxy feeling to a tomato at the grocery store, but something is telling me that I need to grow my own fruits and veggies. Unfortunately, I live in the worst possible place to garden. The "soil" (and I use that loosely) here is dust and rocks. And every few weeks gets another layer of dust on top of that. In order to have a functioning garden, you have to essentially dig up your entire yard and replace it with acceptable soil for growing a plant. Since I'm just beginning this gardening journey, I was looking for something a lot less demanding!

A couple months ago, while surfing Pinterest, I found out about Straw Bale Gardening. Essentially, you buy a couple straw bales, fertilize them, soak them with a hose for a few weeks and magically you have an acceptable place to place your plants. The websites I read claimed that you could buy straw bales for the cheap price of $2-$5 but around here, I found them at a local feed store for $7.95 which is still cheap considering how much it would cost to dig up the ground. I started with 3 bales and some ammonium sulfate as a fertilizer. It absolutely did the job but next time I will stick with chicken manure in order to keep it as organic as possible. Live and learn. After getting started, I bought three more bales of hay so now my garden consists of six.

I planted some herbs and tomato plants. Fortunately, once the bales have soaked for two weeks, you do not have to water your plants every day. The bales are more than wet and only the top dries out. The bales also keep the ground underneath them wet and fertile and now the ground under the bales is more like soil than dust and it's teeming with bugs and worms. The ground around my straw bales is also very wet and fertile and there is grass growing all around them. I'm not sure if it's left over grass from the straw or some dormant grass seed from a lawn long ago.

Here you can see the bales and the grass growing all around them. If you look past the bales you can see the rocky hard soil that is my backyard. And to the left top of the picture you can see the path the water run off takes. That hasn't been watered since the night before but you can see the ground is retaining water much better.

Unfortunately, we had a little set back when we went to visit my parents. Our new puppy, Mindy, ate the seedlings that I had nurtured and dug up the plants that I had planted. I didn't think anything had survived but the mint I had planted seems to be making a come-back on it's own.

So, I cheated and went to Wal-Mart and bought an heirloom tomato plant about two weeks ago and planted it. Low and behold, it bears fruit!!

Feeling pretty confident after seeing that!

And just as a comparison, I did dig up a four foot by two foot patch of land for corn. To fill in with the organic soil and fertilizer, cost me about the same as three bales of straw. And it's efficient. Especially for corn which I hear is hard to do in straw because it's so top heavy.

The grass or whatever it is, is seeping into this area as well. I may have my own field of alfalfa soon!