Showing posts with label gardening. Show all posts
Showing posts with label gardening. Show all posts

Sunday, April 17, 2011

Straw bales and potato cages

Straw bales with soil topping and drip irrigation system.  We eat the dandelions, so I don't count them as weeds... ;)
* We linked this post at Monday Mania at The Healthy Home Economist and Real Food Wednesday at Kelly the Kitchen Kop *

My straw bale experiments are finally yielding some results, so I thought I'd pass on what I've observed so far, and give a little update on the process while I'm at it.


Sunday, March 13, 2011

Straw Bale Gardening - Part 2: Cooking the Bales (Dude1)


Here, at the urban household of Dude1, we've been hard at work trying to accelerate the "cooking" (composting) of our straw bale garden.  I live in the mouth of a canyon and consequently get a lot of wind, especially this time of year.  That's been making it hard to keep my bales moist which is important for getting the bales to cook.  Therefore, my (almost) 2 year old has been kindly adding a little extra water to the bales : )

Saturday, March 5, 2011

Dude2's Straw Bale Garden


* We linked this post at Monday Mania at The Healthy Home Economist *

Dude1 got the jump on me by about a week on the straw bale setup, but I finally got it together yesterday to get my garden started as well.  I've done some gardening before and really enjoyed it, so I was a bit dismayed at the timing of buying my new farm -- I got it in the fall, and because of other work I had to do I wasn't able to prepare a garden spot.  I decided that it would be best to make a straw bale garden the first year, then use all that wonderful compost to prep the dirt-based plot that I'll be using during subsequent years.