Well, since I last posted our 2012 garden plans, we’ve started talking about changing up our backyard.
 |
| The original (working) 2012 Backyard Garden plan as of a few weeks ago |
What does “changing up our backyard” mean? Well, taking out the rocks/gravel and adding in some new beds for veggies. This also comes with a specific request from Tool Lady…”meandering paths”.
Hmmm…well…this has sent me into an excited spin of imaginings, wonderings and hopeful anticipation of having both a front and back yard that are super productive!
I’ve been researching garden plans and designs, sketching things out and fantasizing about more growing space. I’ve also been concerned about the time and money we can actually (realistically) put into such a huge undertaking this spring.
Well, at the beginning of this week we’d considered the following:
- Remove all the rocks/gravel
- Expand the chicken run
- Consolidate the compost
I’ve been struggling with how to design new beds into the backyard while maintaining nice meandering paths/walking paths that make sense. Here’s the plan I came up with a little over a week ago…It’s mostly paths since I was assuming all the space in between would become beds of some sort…except, of course, directly around our little fire pit.
 |
| The 2012 (working) Backyard Garden plan – take two! |
However, yesterday I stumbled upon straw bale garden beds and found these amazing images on strawbalegardens.com and have been completely inspired!!!
Have you heard of straw bale gardening? It sounds brilliant! I’d love to try this! I’m thinking it could save lots of time, money and work but am wondering if it is really as successful as some of these pictures allude to. I also think they look quite attractive! Now, they wouldn’t last forever, maybe a season or two…but we could recycle the soil and the leftover straw could be used for the chicken coop and.or the compost. Also, we won’t be in this house forever, so…win, win???
I’d love to hear your ideas or experiences and would appreciate any thoughts you’d like to share!
Great post! Yeah, I was thinking of the expense of straw, but it might do doable for small areas. Thanks for the link!
You’re welcome, Laura! We’re definitely assessing the cost, especially since straw has gone up from $5 a bale a couple of weeks ago to $7.50 a bale last weekend! Crazy!
I found your Blog tonight by accident and when i saw the pictures of the “Straw Bale Gardens”, I read a little more.
And I desided that this is my kind of Blog!
I’m a Blog Junkie and I read about 40 “Homesteading” Blogs all the time, and write one of my own!
worms-a-crawlingfarm.blogspot.com. From the name, you might get the idea that I raise “Red Wigglers” and you would be right! Com by some time for a look see!
Tom
Welcome, Tom! Thanks for finding me! I’ll pop on over to your blog and see what you’re up to!
I always wanted to try straw bale gardening, and we may do it in our back courtyard after the animals are out of there. Dom is always drooling over the dirty bales of straw that seem to get neglected on some of the farms around here. However…he’s afraid to go onto the property and ask if they’re getting rid of them out of fear of getting shot. LOL The straw bales we get around here cost us $5.50 each for clean straw. It would probably break us financially if we gardened with clean good straw bales. We do use the straw as mulch, but it goes a long way when it gets broken down.
We use all the duck and chicken poop straw bedding for making compost. When I start making our garden beds, I’ll use the duck and chicken poop straw in the garden instead.
I do think a lot of space can utilized on the straw bales as opposed to regular raised garden beds. Whatever you plant directly into the top, you could plant the companion on the sides and have a three sided raised bed. If one side of the bale doesn’t receive full sun you could also plant strawberries, lettuce and onions on the vertical part of the bales. 🙂
My one concern would be there not being enough nutrients getting to the roots. I know some use soil, compost, blood and bone meal, but before even doing all that, you can saturate it with urine. I bet duck poop water would be great on it too! If you decide to go the straw bale route, let me know and we can bring up lots of duck poop water to put all over the bales, and you can use the rest directly in the garden beds too. We had tremendous growth in our trees and fruits and veggies because of the duck poop water.
Angela, what an amazing response! Thank you so much for your thoughts and insight! I honestly didn’t even think about the vertical spaces being used! Strawberries and lettuce and onions?! Fantastic! One issue might be cost after all…straw bales have gone from $5 each to $7.50 just in the last couple of weeks! Crazy! However, it’ll still be cheaper than purchasing wood and a ton of soil for raised beds. I will definitely let you know if we decide to go that route because if we do, we would love some of your duck poop water! We could have a garden party!!! How cool would that be?!
I would love it! We have about 6 five gallon buckets that we can use to fill with poop water. I’m getting ready to clean the pools out right now to use on fruit trees. We also use the poop water as an insulator for making our compost. A few ducks in a baby pool can do wonders for your garden. 🙂
Duck poop water sounds awesome! I’ll let you know what we decide ASAP 🙂 Thanks for being so generous! It would be great to meet, too…compare adventures in real time!
When I grew my potatoes this year I put the potatoes directly onto the soil and then put a big layer of straw on top and then top that with manure. The potatoes grew really well and I have since planted lettuces, beetroot and chard in the straw which is now a mixture of dirt, manure but mostly straw. They are growing brilliantly. So I reckon provided you can get enough nutrients into the straw by either soaking it or topping it with manure it should work fine. I will be really interested to see how you go if you try this approach.
Liz, thanks for the tip! Your method is very similar to what we did last year with our potatoes, however, even smarter! I never thought to plant my fall veggies in the straw/soil mixture that was left when we harvested all the potatoes! Brilliant! There are still a lot of details to figure out, but I’m pretty excited about the possibilities 🙂