Monday, February 16, 2015

Never too old to learn.

Straw bale gardening.
 A concept we had never heard of before until one of my blogging friends mentioned it, ( thanks Carole). We are always interested in trying new things, especially if they appear to be labour saving or  easier on our backs. We have already increased the height of the raised beds for outside crops but the strawberries in the tunnel needed some thought, then Carole mentioned this idea. The more I read up on it the more it appealed, especially for the strawberries, last year I must have wasted as many as I cropped as the beds are too low and a little to wide.
The concept is simple, take a bale of straw and condition it, this takes about ten days and involves soaking the bales daily and adding a high nitrogen fertiliser every other day. Straw locks up nitrogen so this must be replaced. As the bales start to decompose they will heat up, they can reach a temperature of  135f after ten days or so, they will then gradually cool down. When the bales have reached to 38c or around 100f you can then plant  into pockets filled with soil or compost. Because the bales are still warm you should produce crops a couple of weeks earlier than normal and the growing season should be extended. As bales are around 20 inches high it seems an ideal method for strawberries, no more back breaking cropping. I suspect you would only get one or maybe two seasons growing in a bale but what you will be left with will be a mound of lovely rich compost already in the right position.
Bales installed, far right, garlic looking good.
So the centre bed in the tunnel has now been planted with straw bales, they have had their first two soakings and the first feed, we had two buckets of liquid feed left from last year, one of stinging nettle juice and one of comfrey, we will also use seaweed meal and dried blood fish and bone, wood ash will also be added.
We will also do a direct comparison with tomatoes, we only need four plants, two will be done in a straw bale and two in large buckets, as we did last year. It will be interesting to see if there is any difference  in yield, flavour and cropping time.
A few days ago I received an online news letter from the GIY ( grow it yourself) website advocating the use of lime. No mention was made about doing a soil test to see if in fact you did need to lime. Liming is said to sweeten the soil, it also raises the ph. We had done a ph test when we first moved in, we were 7 which is neutral, ideal for growing most vegetables, but since then we have added a tremendous amount of manure and compost. Manure can raise the ph level.
A soil test was needed before we rushed to lime anything. I glad we did.
Way to high.
We are now bordering on a ph of 8 which is far too high for most things. We could use sulphate of ammonia but that is a chemical compound, or pine needles. We are surrounded by Sitka spruce forests so Simon gather a sack full of fallen needles which he macerated, he then did a ph test on the result, ph 5, so that added to the beds will over time lower the ph again, in the meantime we will have to resort to using some peat which we would have preferred not to do, but it is Irish and the production is carefully regulated.

14 comments:

  1. This is going to be an interesting experiment to watch. I think Tilly the Terrible would have fun pulling the bales apart. She ate an entire potato crop. So much fun.

    Hmmm ive also wondered about my PH as im always adding stuff without checking.

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    1. We rather got out of the habit of soil testing Lynda when we stopped full time farming, as we have to lower our ph we will test again next year to see if we have succeeded. You could use straw bales inside one of you raised beds, that would stop Tilly. There is lots of information about straw bale gardening, I have also ordered a book on the subject, it will be interesting to see how well it works.

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    2. Anne, My first year all the beds had straw in the bottom to fill them up. I packed them in tight but by the end of year 1 they had all composted down and my soil levels were half way down the beds. Now its my 3rd summer season and i've topped the beds yet again and they now sit about 30 cm from the top ledge. They get great protection from the wind when the plants are little and i can put mesh on top using the rubber strips covering edges to keep it tight. It works well. When the seedling are bigger i take it off and they fend for themselves. Im thinking of a new bed for potatoes and i may use the straw as you suggest.

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    3. I remember years ago Bob Flowerdew from 'Gardeners Question Time' was a big advocate of straw as compost, he reckoned that if you used male pee on a bale it rotted down very quickly into a fine and rice compost.

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  2. Love the idea of free pine needles at pH 5 to neutralise your alkali soil! Genius.

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    1. I can't claim this as my idea, Google is my friend! I looked up how to lower ph in soil. We just happened to have easy access to pine needles, I think they will be slow release so will still have to use some peat.

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  3. Think your very sensible to check the PH, especially with a lot of Irish soil being acidic. The straw bale gardening sounds interesting!

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    1. Do you soil test Dave? We only did it after reading on the GIY site to lime now, as we had started out at 7 we were interested to see what effect all the compost and manure had made, anything between 6'5 and 7'5 is ideal, adding lime would have been a disaster.
      Regarding the straw bale idea I love it, anything that can make life easier.

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  4. I will be interested to see how it works.

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  5. The temperature is coming up in the bales so they must have started the composting process, it will be interesting to see how long they take to get up to full temperature.

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  6. I will watch this topic with great interest - seems like such a good idea and you have all that lovely decomposing straw to use at the end of it all.

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  7. It seems like a win win project to us, time will tell and as you say, we will have all that compost at the end of it.

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  8. Gardening is a science! Very imformative, it will be interesting to see what happens with the tomatoes...

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  9. Well, the worst that can happen is that we have a large amount of good compost. I will be hedging our bets and planting a couple of tomatoes the way we normally do and keeping one row of strawberries just in case!

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