Tuesday, November 2, 2010

Hay Bale Gardening

I guess its Week 19... who's counting? :) I have a hay bale garden- filled with yummy vegetable plants that are presently threatening us with 15 ripening green tomatoes at once. I painsakingly water, stake, and... well thats all I do really because this garden is the easiest! I got the idea from this site, so I cant take all the credit. Basically I bought 6 hay bales from the feed store, the kind of hay that is in large rectangle-cubes (I know that is the wrong description but what is a 3-dimensional rectangle called?) that horses eat. Got that?

Then I bought already established vegetables plants from Home Depot since my attempt to grow seeds made me feel like I had to give up my Green Thumb membership. Stuffed the plants right into the top of the hay, then viola! Instant garden, no bending over to take care of, no weeds, super easy. I DID have to get the bales 'ready', something I learned from this site. Anyways, my point of all this was to say I found dirt on sale at Walmart over the weekend so cheap that I almost updated my FB account exclaiming how grown up I felt over my excitement over dirt. I didnt put it on FB, but it was a great deal: bags of Organic Choice Miracle Grow for $1. For the benefit of my garden, vegetables and flowers and everything, I bought all Walmart offered. Then spread it all over the tops of my hay bales to insure they were recieving nutrients as the hay doesnt offer any. Just something I felt like they needed. And my point of all THAT, was to say something incredible happened after I spread Organic Miracle Grow dirt... Incredible in a disgusting way, in a way made me wish I'd never gone to Walmart that day. There is serious 'organic' stuff in this dirt because it caused a fungus to grow on 2 of my plants that scared the &#%#& out of me when I saw it. Jason and I poked it with a stick, ready to run, imagining a swarm of somethings to fly out. When nothing did, I did what any of you would've done, I Googled it. I Googled "Orange puffy fungus" and found a plethora of sites dedicated to this fungus they so accurately and scientificaly call "Dog Vomit Fungus". Can you picture what I've seen now? Google it, I dont even want to put the sites on here. G-r-o-s-sness. From what I've read, its harmless and.... you just deal with it (its even gone now, the next day, since I didnt water my plants [and they are bone dry]-- which I am now scared to do). Anyone wanna come over and eat a fresh salad at my place? On a happy note, I can feel the baby kick for sure now. Its been a few weeks of tapping inside, but now it is confirmed, there is a moving thing alive inside of me.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

It's straw bale gardening, not hay bale. Hay will not work for this.

Anonymous said...

Hay will absolutely work for this! I grow hay...not wheat. Horses do not eat wheat (straw being the bi-product of it's growth) and the author specifically stated the type that horses eat. I'm assuming that means it's legume based like I grow (specifically alfalfa/grass mix, which is a nitrogen fixing plant), so it will begin to self-compost pretty readily. You want your flowers on alfalfa just starting to open so that everything the plant has is going to the top rather than already bloomed and seeding b/c then everything starts going back into the roots for storage again, but as we grow a mixed crop for a more diverse nutrient profile as well as to ward off bloat in animals being fed with bales daily and different plants/grasses produce at different times, there may still be some germination take place and weeds emerge. No more than the wheat that's going to likely sprout from your straw bale, though. Straw has the other disadvantage of often being treated with crap that you don't really want to eat...sorry to say to get the wheat to dry earlier so it's in your store bought flour, too. Not that anyone cares that we eat it in the crop, but the intention of the straw (as a bi-product) is primarily for bedding and other insulating type jobs, not to feed anything. My hay is clean and, contrary to the authors thinking, packed full of nutrients. There's no surer way to keep even a convoluting PERSON alive than alfalfa tea! A horse would not live long if what it was eating didn't provide nutrients. But I would add that the soil she added was actually necessary, so a lucky after thought (and great deal that I'm jealous of), because when she watered that soil it released some pretty necessary components to draw and trap needed things (bacteria/moisture/insects) into the bale to actually release that nutrition. I've had bales sit in the field for as long as two years and simply appeared to be weathered from top view but only a fourth of their original height do to the composition happening against the ground. I'm going to look around the site a bit to see any updates, but really, she meant HAY BALE gardening.

Anonymous said...

Oops...I worded the beginning of that last comment...horse do eat wheat, they are not fed straw daily if the owner has any intention of them living.