Hay Bale Gardening
During the past 25 years of trying to garden in my part of Texas, I have learned two things.
- You have to create your own soil via some form of radical composting. The soil here is simply no good. Wildflowers like it, but not most vegetables. There are actually some very large crop farms locally, but they are completely dependent on liquid fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides.
- You have to extend your growing season by planting very very early, and then be prepared to cover in case of frost. No vegetables will grow during the summer in 100 degree weather. If you can shade and water vegetables during the summer so they survive, you might have a pretty good fall garden.
Gardening turned around for me almost ten years ago when I discovered the work of Dr. Deb Tolman. http://www.debtolman.com/ She is a botanist currently based in Clifton, TX. I watched her YouTube videos, bought her DVD, then paid for an hour long phone conversation with her. At the time her work mostly focused on keyhole gardens. They are raised beds that you build by layering organic materials. There is a vertical cylindrical wire basket in the center that you keep filled with wet compost. I could never keep my baskets filled with wet compost so ultimately took them out. Rather, each year I add new layers and use other irrigation. But they have been great, as long as I plant early enough.
Two years ago I planted fruit trees (stick bare root) in 3 of my beds. During year one and year two, they were small enough that I had vegetables planted around them. Now they are large and have taken over, so I need quick new beds! I have 3 new concrete block beds and a earthbag bed that are still unfinished - but they require pending tractor work I personally cannot do. This has made me nervous, because I am running out of time! Then a friend sent me an article about hay bale gardening. http://marilyn.hagle.com/haybale.pdf
The website where this article originates has numerous nefarious posts, however a YouTube search of hay bale gardening revealed many reputable contributions with success stories. Most of these folks use square bales of hay or straw. But I found one from the University of Wisconsin that used round bales. Here are two representative videos.
[video:https://youtu.be/W8ZnEyIpBBk]
[video:https://youtu.be/YuBkqt1czYg]
Our county in Texas received 80 inches of rain in 2015 and 2016 brought almost 60 inches. Farmers had the opportunity to create lots of round hay bales. Probably fueled by the memory of drought years and hay shortages, they baled and baled and baled. Now we see rotting round bales littering the countryside. Most are still intact enough to move, so that presents us with an enormous opportunity for hay bale gardening. I have 11 bales.
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As you can see the bales are wrapped in plastic with a sprinkler on the top. These pictures were taken after my first application of 1 cup of 46-0-0 nitrogen fertilizer sprinkled on top of each bale. I will water them every day for 10 days, but apply fertilizer only every other day. I purchased the fertilizer at Athens Farm and Garden . . . https://www.facebook.com/AthensFarmandGarden/
It also works to apply urine instead of fertilizer. Have every male member of your family pee into milk jugs for a week or two. 
The bales should heat up to as high as 140 degrees. (Keep them wet!) When you are done conditioning and they cool back down, you are ready to plant. Plants go right into the hay, but if you plant seeds you put a bit of potting soil on top.
So if you want to garden and have a round bale sitting around. Push it over. Shrink wrap it. Water and condition it. Plant.
I hope it works for me like it has for these other folks!
Comments
(No subject)
Growing stuff is not easy.
It seems to be getting more difficult as the weather becomes more erratic. I'm in South-Central Texas so heat and drought are our biggest problems. I'm also on the edge of the Hill Country with all those inherent problems of rocky and thin soil. My family, over the years, has had some fantastic harvests as well as a good portion of failed harvests. Its always been OK though because gardening was more of a hobby than anything else. Now I'm inclined to approach gardening more seriously, mostly because I don't have the energy to just fiddle around and get bad results.
Thanks for your interesting ideas and links. I will check them out more thoroughly this evening. Today I'm broadcasting some more lettuce seeds, supposedly I have until mid-March to be OK with this. I had some luck with a variety of lettuce and other greens through fall and winter here (which was, for the most part very mild this year).
I'm reading a book which strikes me as being very good. Its called Gardening When It Counts by Steve Solomon. I'll bring up some of his ideas if anyone is interested.
I feel your same sense of urgency to grow my own food . . .
And I will check out your book. Thanks!
As a child growing up in Iowa, my family raised or grew almost everything. I know it is possible. And true . . . food cannot be a hobby anymore. I am about an hour south of Dallas. Alkaline soil. But there are foods that grow wild on our property . . . dewberries, grapes, plums, cactus, mesquite bean pods, and a bit of passion fruit. I would like to learn to harvest these more diligently as well.
Presently, it would be totally impossible for our locality to live on locally grown food. The thousands of acres of crops are cotton, field corn, milo, winter wheat, and sunflowers. Most of those do not go for human consumption. Acres and acres of food = but nothing to eat.
Hay bales seem like they could be more sustainable. My husband could buy an old baler and we could make our own bales. I expect these to last a few years before they finally compost out.
I also plan to create a dome frame for each using pex plumbing pipe, T-joints, and a top hub, that could be covered with plastic, shade cloth, or insulating cloth. Mini-greenhouse in the winter and shade in the summer.
Marilyn
"Make dirt, not war." eyo
Nook and Cranny Garden
Peak Moment had a two part series on Nook and Cranny Gardens. The focus was on planting veggies in every Nook and Cranny of the property. It's like just going with what ever opportunity presents itself. These videos inspired me to think differently.
[video:https://youtu.be/pc0bIn7T-DA]
Marilyn
"Make dirt, not war." eyo
My partner still has her blog up about her straw bale garden.
Yes, human-sourced nitrogen was a regular part of it.
Here it is (last page first...or something like that): http://thedirtioccupy.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2012-01-16T10:36:0...
"I’m a human being, first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.” —Malcolm X
Wonderful!
Thank you!
Marilyn
"Make dirt, not war." eyo
Your partner's blog
is so inspirational. I'm glad its still up and will make a point to dip in there when I can because its so neat! I also enjoy the history in the blog, I recall that you have mentioned that mining incident before.
I want to go back and look at the references to the masonry work. I just spent 2 days collecting rocks (that is one thing we have in abundance here) to partially fill up leaky water troughs to use as planters. That's not masonry work I know.....but it is the necessary preliminary to masonry work
(and I have the achy back to prove it).
May I link to your partner's blog?
I would like to cross post this on resilience.org, and include a link with a picture to your partner's blog. Her essay is one of the best I have seen! All of her essays that I have read so far are all excellent.
Marilyn
"Make dirt, not war." eyo
The picture of your hay
bales is impressive. I hope your garden does well. Please give an update on how it works out for you if you can. I am curious.
Those bales look big though and I am wondering how much they weigh.
Our garden is much more conventional (which means it has all the flaws inherent in that system) and it is on borrowed land of family who has acreage with cattle (so we have convenient access to cow manure which is very handy). Given that we are guests gardeners we don't undertake anything but conventional infrastructure work to support and improve the garden. So I have that limitation. But it works out, we share and they share and I think everyone is happy with the situation.
I love your idea about using the wild foods available. I really enjoy harvesting from the wild and have enjoyed that since I was a kid. I know that cactus pads have the reputation of diminishing adult onset diabetes. One year I collected the purple cactus fruit (it was very labor intensive to remove the thorns) and made a juice from them. The juice was a beautiful garnet color and it wasn't too sweet. I also gathered agarita berries one year and made jam. Those berries make a fantastic jam. I am on a mission to identify the edibles that grow in the wild here bearing in mind of course not to deplete a resource.
Anyway, long story short, I enjoyed your essay.
We are both doing the same thing in
. . . working with our current situations. You have friends who give you a gardening spot. That's great. And cow poop!
Yes the bales are big and heavy. My husband moved them and put them in place with the tractor and it took both of us to push them over. It is just that the bales that are getting too old for cattle are plentiful and cheap. $25 delivered. $15 if you pick them up. There might be even better deals out there.
Marilyn
"Make dirt, not war." eyo
There's also hugelkultur, if you have wood available.
You build a long pile of wood and brush, layer manure or whatever you have available, and plant it. You can dig a trench (or not) and start by laying logs in it before you start to pile things up. The original, from Germany gets 6' tall, steep sided, with the sides planted (strawberries?) and fruit/nut trees/shrubs on top. The decaying wood holds moisture even in drought conditions and brings in woodland fungi to enrich your soil microbiota. You can use your mounds on slopes to contour them and slow rainwater enough to sink and store it in the soil, too.
My versions will never get to 6', but up to 3' sounds reasonable over time. I have planted tomatoes in a pile of fairly fresh horse manure, and they seemed really happy. Horse manure isn't very hot and still has recognizable grass fibers in it.
I am glad you brought that up
. . . and would like to hear more about your adventures in hugelkultur!
We lost hundreds of trees in 2012 to the Mexican Soapberry Borer Beetle, so we still have lots of decaying wood around still. I put old logs at the bottom of my raised beds, but would like to do something more serious with the wood.
Marilyn
"Make dirt, not war." eyo
There are a fair number of websites with more information
I googled hugelkultur and it's really simpler if you just do it too than if I try to decide which sites you'd find more suitable to your situation. I started to copy them here, but it didn't look like such a good idea.