by Carolyn Noblett

Created on: January 21, 2011   Last Updated: May 01, 2012

Straw bale gardening is a good way to use available sunlight in a yard that has large amounts of shade. By tracking the sun, you can best determine where to lay your bales. You can even use individual bales for small mini gardens.

Straw bales can also help to keep you off the ground when you garden. There will be times of course, when you may still need to get down on your knees for some sort of maintenance but for the most part, it won’t be nearly as difficult to get up. You can use the bales themselves to help you rise.

Planning.

Decide where the best sunlight is for your garden and purchase the number of  bales with that information in mind. Try to purchase straw bales rather than hay bales if you can. You will have quite a bit more grass sprout with hay than with straw and it is much more difficult to keep pulled.

Even with straw, you will have grass sprout but not nearly as much. You can either keep it pulled or trimmed so it doesn’t go to seed in your bales. Some gardeners just let the grass grow with everything else for a natural approach.

Often people prefer using the bales with the twine top and bottom while others prefer the twine on the sides. If you lay them with the twine on top and bottom, you will probably need to reinforce your bales at the ends with a stake so the bale remains stable after the twine begins to disintegrate.

The bales will saturate and hold water a little better if you put the twine on the top and bottom. Water sometimes runs straight through if you lay the bales on their sides. If you are gardening on a patio or on concrete, you will want to make sure to lay the bales with the twine on the sides. These can't be staked, of course, but you could build trellis over them if you liked.

When gardening on the ground, place them end to end driving a stake into the ground at the end of each row. This isn’t always necessary but it can help the bales hold together longer. You can place the rows far enough apart to run your mower between them.

Conditioning the straw.

After you have decided where to place your bales, you will want to begin conditioning. For about two weeks, a daily watering will help the straw to begin its decomposition.

A standard hose and faucet can be used for watering or watering can be done with a soaker system attached to a rain barrel. If you can place your straw bales slightly downhill from a rain barrel, you will have gravity feed for watering. If you like, you can

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