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.

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 : )

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.