Organic Straw Bale Garden Conditioning Recipe

How's that for a mouthful of a title? I've written about this topic before and why it's important to condition straw bales before planting. For a refresher check out this post. (You'll also get a glimpse of what last year's garden layout was.) I'm using 15 new bales again this year, but I also left a couple of old bales in the formation for growing carrots and pumpkins.

This is our new layout that takes into account a few things I learned from our first two years using this method:

1) I need more room between the rows so we put two bales at the top of the formation.

2) Extending one side gives vines some extra room and I can still get into the middle of the garden.

3) Using bales from the previous year for growing carrots will give them a 'softer' place to grow. Carrots don't like dense soil so it makes sense they wouldn't like the dense bales. Also, too much nitrogen reduces the number of female flowers on pumpkins. I'm going to try a pumpkin plant in the old straw to see if that helps produce more pumpkins.

4) potatoes can be grown by placing the the seed potatoes directly on the surface and then covering them with straw. That inner row of old bales is my supply of straw to cover the potatoes as they grow in the space I labeled 'potatoes'.

(That white stuff on the bales? Snow. I don't want to talk about it.)

Ok, so lets get down to business. The traditional method of conditioning bales is as follows:

Day 1) 1/2 cup of 34-0-0 per bale and then water the bales
Day 2) water
Day 3) 1/2 cup of 34-0-0 per bale and more water
Day 4) water
Day 5) 1/2 cup of 34-0-0 per bale and water
Day 6) water
Day 7,8,9) 1/4 cup 34-0-0 and water
Day 10) 1 cup 10-10-10 per bale and water

You can plant any day after that if you can feel heat in the bales. Don't forget you'll need a couple inches of potting soil for seeds. Seedlings can be placed directly into the bales.

To condition organically this is what works for me:

Follow the same game plan as above but substitute the following recipe for the 34-0-0 conventional fertilizer above.... Updated to answer the question asked by Summer Jo in the comments - the three numbers stand for the ratio of nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium in the fertilizer. This site gives a very detailed explanation if you want to read more about what these numbers mean.

In a bucket combine,
2.5T of Bloodmeal 12-0-0
1.77 cups of Dr. Earth's 5-7-3
1.25 cups of Milorganite 5-2-0
.68 cups of Milorganite 6-2-0

To reach the 10-10-10 ratio I use:
1.77 cups of Dr. Earth's 4-4-4
1.77 cups of Dr. Earth's 5-7-3

Using organic nitrogen sources means it might take a few extra days for the bales to be 100% ready for planting. Use your best judgement - if it's been cool, you probably want to condition a few extra days - it can't hurt! We set our bales out over a week ago so mother nature could give a few extra soakings before we officially start conditioning.

Straw Bale Garden Plans for 2011

I'm not brave enough to start my own seeds...maybe some day...but for now my garden prep involves mapping out where and what I'm going to plant. This is my third year of straw bale gardening and I'm excited to expand it to include some foods grown specifically for BabyBear.

You can read all about our strawbale garden successes and failures by clicking on the tab under my blog header.

I'm very grateful for this blog and the things I've recorded here so I can look back at the things I've learned and not make the same mistakes twice. I started a garden notebook last year and used my blog archives to update my notes last week. I highly recommend this! It's wonderful to be able to look back at the different layouts I've used for planting, what grew well, what I shouldn't bother with, and to record plant dates and harvest dates. What a great resource to pass down to my kids some day!

Thanks to some pictures I took of the garden I'll even be able to purchase the exact same variety of watermelon and pumpkin this year and skip this type of cucumber. (tasty, but way too big!) Ideally I would write down this information in my notebook - something I'll make sure I do when I purchase this year's plants!

Are you planning a garden this year? Are you one of the brave souls who starts their seeds indoors? Do tell!

MamaBear's {Not so} Mild Salsa

My little garden helpers and I had quite a collection of tomatoes as of this morning. We planted eight tomato plants this year so we could have enough ripe at the same time for salsa making. I still haven't brought myself to make sauce...it's so depressing how little you get from all.those.tomatoes.





PapaBear and I love salsa and we love to share our salsa so by request I'm sharing my salsa recipe with you today! It will also be nice to have the recipe preserved for future canners like this little cutie who helped me in the kitchen much of the morning.
















MAMABEAR'S {NOT SO} MILD SALSA

30 medium sized tomatoes
2 green bell peppers
1 red bell pepper
1 yellow bell pepper
4 medium sized onions
1 cup vinegar
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 cup salt
1 cup chopped cilantro
3 cloves minced garlic
6 habanero peppers (I remove the insides & then chop them finely)

Add the habaneros last because you MUST USE GLOVES when handling them.

Prepare tomatoes by removing skins (soak in boiling water for 30 seconds and then transfer to ice water so the skins start to slip off)

Cook all tomatoes on medium high heat while you chop the remaining ingredients. Mash the tomatoes as they cook to break them up into smaller pieces. Then start adding the salt, sugar, and vinegar. After 45-60 minutes of cooking down the tomatoes, start to add the rest of the veggies.

Cook an additional 30-60 minutes depending on how thick you want the salsa to be. The longer you cook it, the thicker it will be. I love that while I'm doing all this prep, my dishwasher is sanitizing and heating up my jars. I also by this point have put my canners on the stove and have an extra pot of water heating to sterilize the rims of my jars.

I cut up a 1/2 gallon milk container to use as a funnel and use a ladle to grab one scoop of veggies from the bottom of the pot, one scoop of juice from the top, and one scoop from the side of the pot. By then the jar is filled one inch from the top. I pull four jars out of the dishwasher at at time so they stay hot and then continue to fill the rest of them until I have ten filled.

Wipe down the lip of the jar, place the lid on, and screw the rim on (but not too tight) I use pint sized jars because that's about how much salsa we'd eat in a week once a jar has been opened. I put the jars in a water bath for 15 minutes and then set them on my counter to cool for a day.

From 30 tomatoes we have ten pints of salsa - can't argue with that!

Do you have a favorite canning recipe?

Over the shoulder pumpkin holder

(the pumpkin on 8.2.10 that was first shown in this post)

Then and Now

Our Straw bale garden on June 6th















...and again on July 7th.












And most recently on August 4th: Full progress report to follow...just as soon as I finish harvesting a billion cherry tomatoes!

Suspended (7.15.2010)

It's great for growing beans....





Not so much for growing pumpkins.

Growing Veggies in Straw

I wouldn't have it any other way!

No weeding, no bending, no tilling, no digging.

Instead I water when needed, add some food when the plants show signs of needing a boost and this is what happened only 4 weeks after the first picture:


A few other things I'm learning to do along the way:

Don't overdo the nitrogen - if there's too much pumpkins won't form

Sometimes you need to help out in the pollination department (I brush pollen from one plant to the other with a dry paintbrush)

Prune the tomatoes (seen on right) so they don't get so wild and the plant will put more energy into tomato production instead of all those extra branches


Buy a different kind of lettuce - one that doesn't get bitter in hot weather. (That's the lettuce we stopped picking on the left because it tastes TERRIBLE)


Plant way more peas and radishes.

What have YOU learned about gardening this year?

Who knew vegetables could be cute?

And for those of you who are following along on our straw bale gardening adventure, here are some overall shots that I try to take once a week. Click here to compare to earlier photos.






***sorry there won't be an Alphabitty Moments post this week - the wedding is upon us and I have been caught up in preparations and visiting with family. See you all in a few days with wedding photos!***

Garden Goodies Already!

Having one year of straw bale gardening under our belts is nice. I have something to compare to. Since I planted a week later than last year these photos from June 19th, 2009 are a good comparison point.










We didn't get any radishes last year so already we're off to a better start. We have way more bean plants this year and we're trying peas for the first time. They are climbing so high that they are well on their way to the 5th wire up!

I've added another dose of bone meal to stave off blossom end rot and some manure to help boost the squash plants that, admittedly, shouldn't be so close together.

The peppers are blooming and I can't keep track of how many of our 12 tomato plants are sprouting new tomatoes. That a problem I can live with!

Lots of rainy nights followed by sunny days makes for one happy garden and gardener!

Signs of summer

Fresh produce from the garden. These radishes were yummy on our salads at dinner last night. Just the right amount of kick.











Kids on the ballfield. It was Sam's first game and he did GREAT. Listened to his coach, hit the ball every time, ran as fast as he could, and hustled to get the ball to first when it came to him. I was so proud! I took a few video clips for PapaBear to watch when we got home. The kids got snacks after the game - sugary sweetness in the form of fruit snacks and capri sun. I wasn't thrilled about all that sugar (and liquid!) right before bed but it's all part of the fun.

Right?

I didn't plant 'em, but I'm glad they're there.

Mushrooms in straw bale gardens are a good thing. They are a sign of good decomp. I have to say that this is a little extreme for my liking. I've had to go out and brush off the new ones before the attach themselves to the plants. It's probably hard to even tell that these are onions.


This picture is from June 1st. You can see how much progress the plants have made by comparing them to the pictures in this post.

Besides these cucumber blossoms we also have lots of tomato blossoms, 4 cherry tomatoes, 1 Big Boy tomato, lots of plump radishes, and some ambitious beans that have made it to the 4th piece of wire that we are using for support. The tomatoes started out below the first piece and are already past the 3rd piece of wire. Makes tracking progress easy!

How to maintain a straw bale garden

I am a newbie in the gardening world. Four summer's ago I tried container gardening with our first born and like I said back then, I didn't grow much, I just killed them really slowly. I've learned from my mistakes that plants need to be fed multiple times during the growing season. Last year I added fertilizer every couple of weeks.

This year I plan to fertilize my straw bale garden every week to try to avoid the blossom end rot (sign of calcium deficiency by the way - add bone meal) and to encourage my plants to GROW GROW GROW. They are all natural fertilizers and I don't use very much of them at a time. Not a full meal...just a snack....sprinkled carefully around the base of the plant like this:

How to plant a straw bale garden

Edited 2/2012 My stats show that this is one of my most popular straw bale gardening posts so I thought I would add an additional resource if you are interested in starting a straw bale garden of your own. I now blog at campgroundcubs.blogspot.com where you will find a section dedicated to straw bale gardening. I will still reply to any comments left on this post or you can email me directly at 4theloveoffamily@gmail.com Best of luck with your gardening adventures!

Other than sticking plants into straw rather than into the ground, the planting part is pretty similar to traditional gardening. The spacing between plants is the same.

For example, per bale:
2 tomato plants
2-3 squash (then thin to 1)
3 green peppers
2 broccoli

Then it was time to get creative....

lettuce on one half, radishes* on the other and cilantro and rosemary on the side of the bale.

Broccoli on top of the bale and pumpkin on the side.



Green peppers on top and cilantro on the side.





If you remember my garden from last year then you probably notice the biggest difference between the two - the new trellis system is going to replace the tomato cages and the string we strung between the stakes. Tomato cages don't stay standing once the bales start to decompose significantly later in the growing season.

On the side with the concrete reinforcement wire ($7 a sheet at HomeDepot) we planted 12 tomato plants, 4 bean plants, and we planted two rows of peas* (one on each side of the wire).

In front of the peas we planted carrots* and in front of the beans I planted a row of onions (the rest of the onions are planted in their own bale just across the way from the bonus row)

We planted much bigger plants this year and already some blossoms on some of the cherry tomatoes.

And there you have it folks! Pry apart the decomposing bales, stick your plants in and watch your garden grow....


* denotes veggies that were planted as seeds in 2 inches of organic potting soil (The other 'dirt' you see is actually fertilizer & manure. See this post where I talk about how poorly the fertilizer dissolved this year.)

Is a garden really worth all that work?

Chances are you've probably asked yourself that question before. Even though the hardest part of my garden is the math, I wondered if it was worth it to get one decent sized tomato every few days from my four plants. This past winter I got the answer I was looking for. Winter? Yes, winter.

Remember this post where I share a very easy way to preserve tomatoes? The beauty of freezing them is that you can freeze one at a time. Unless you have LOTS of tomato plants you aren't going to have enough ripe at once to preserve them using traditional canning methods. All winter long instead of buying expensive organic tomato puree or diced tomatoes for our chili and our stews we added tomatoes from the freezer. It was pretty easy to guess based on the size of the tomatoes how many it would take to replace how many ounces of canned tomatoes each recipe called for. They were still mostly frozen when they were plopped into the crock pot but every time they cooked down into the perfect consistency.

Saving $3-$6 every time we make stew or chili? That really adds up in BearCountry were it's winter for six months out of the year! Now that's the kind of math I like!

Conditioning our straw bale garden

Last week while we were in the thick of conditioning our straw bales I was glad it wasn't quite time to put these plants into the bales. It was COLD, WINDY, and RAINY. They were much happier in our garage I'm sure.

If you click on the Straw Bale Gardening tab above you can see how the bales have changed in the past few weeks. For some reason the fertilizer combo I used this year wasn't dissolving very well so I came up with this method to help the water move the fertilizer inside the bales. They were decomposing OK so it wasn't hard to create the holes.

It was so easy, I let the three year old do it.


Next up! Planting!

That's it!

After 18 days of watering (1/3 of which was done via rain) our straw bale garden is ready for planting today. We're SO EXCITED!

Straw Bale Gardening - take 2

Our bales are in place. (15 this year compared to last year's 11)

The first application of fertilizer went on April 28th.




We've been taking turns watering the bales every day since.

It sounds so simple right? ...and once you get past all the math involved it really is.

Here are the fertilizers I'm using this year. (Turns out one of the ones I used last year wasn't as 'natural' as I'd thought.) I'm not going to dwell on it - I'm moving on...to a new formula for our new garden.

Remember from last year that the goal is to reach a nitrogen level of 34. We are accomplishing that using this formula:

Determine the total square footage of the bales.
Pick out natural sources of nitrogen that when added together get as close to 34 as possible.
(when you look at the bag of fertilizer there are three numbers listed. Nitrogen is the first one.)

Here's where it gets tricky. Each bag tells you how much you need to add to promote healthy veggies. The company that sells them assumes that you're going to do one or two applications throughout the growing season, but that's not the case for strawbale conditioning. We need to create a nitrogen sink or "hyper decay" as it is sometimes referred to. We have to hit it hard early on to get the bales ready for planting. In order to do that I figure out the amount of fertilizer it will take to apply a full application but spread out over the six days that call for 34-0-0 fertilizer in the conditioning process.

Sometimes I have to convert grams to ounces so I can convert those to teaspoons. Other times I have to convert pounds to ounces and then to cups. It's not an exact science. I'm sure I'm off a little here or there, but based on last years results, my little system works.

Blood Meal has a nitrogen level of 12 so that's a great source.
Then there are a couple of different kinds of Milorganite (pronounced mil-OR-gan-ite)
Dr. Earths adds a level 5.
I also apply manure to the bales to help boost the level of nutrients.

Once I know how much of each fertilizer I am suppose to add every other day I mix it together in a bucket with my rubber gloves. Spend the money on rubber garden gloves - they are worth every penny IMO.

Let the kids fight over who gets to water the garden each other or let mother nature take over that part like we did tonight.

In 12-14 days it will be time to get the plants and seeds into the ground, but first starting on Mother's Day we'll apply the 10-10-10 fertilizer per the conditioning formula. Until then we'll continue to water our beautiful plants that we are hardening since we purchased them on Monday. We found an incredible greenhouse that has huge plants. Instead of doing zucchini, pumpkins, and beans from seeds like last year, we purchased plants. We'll be getting a huge head start and I'm SO excited!

Once it stops raining I'll get some pictures of our new trellis system. It's going to be slick!


***If you hadn't noticed before, there is now a straw bale gardening tab on the navigation bar below my header picture. You can browse through last year's posts to see how our first straw bale garden progressed.***