When doing research about straw bales, I couldn't find any information about if chemicals are in the straw bales. We wanted to do organic gardening and I didn't know if the wheat had been treated with anything, or if it had would the chemicals leach into our vegetables. Since I never found the answer to that question, I was in search of organic straw bales. Now, if you ever decide to search for that, give it up now. What you need to search for is organic wheat farmers. That is when I found what I was looking for. I called the farm and sure enough they had straw bales that they use for their animals, and sell them to other farmers for their animal bedding. Anyway, if you ever need that bit of information, you're welcome :)
So, when you get the bales home, you have to condition them. This process takes about two weeks. The point of this is to start the decomposition proccess. In order to accomplish this, you have to use high amounts of nitrogen. You can use conventional nitrogen, but we used fish emulsion. For normal fertilizing, you need something like 1-2 tablespoons, for the amount of nitrogen we needed, I think we used 5-6 tablespoons. It worked well. The bales reached the desired temperature on schedule. Now, just to let you know, the bales went crazy with mushrooms. Mushrooms are a good sign because it lets you know the bale is decomposing, however, with three curious little kiddos, any mushroom growing in my garden makes me nervous. From some of the research that I did, I'm pretty sure they were Inky mushrooms, and are edible. Now, I didn't try them out so don't hold me to that. I am not a mushroomologist :) I still made sure my kids didn't go near the bales when there was any sign of mushrooms or slime mold. Once the bales reached the desired temperature, it was time to plant.
When you plant, you need to split the bale a little bit and drop some clean soil into the bale. Then just stick your plant in. If you're planting from seed, you just place a layer of soil on top of the bale and place the seeds into the soil. We covered ours with some netting to keep hungry birds from taking our little seeds. When our seeds started sprouting, we removed the netting. After that, things took off. We had plenty to get us through the season, and canned a few jars of tomatoes, but next year we plan to make the garden significantly larger. I love it because you don't have to worry about the pests like you have with a traditional garden, so you really have no need for chemicals. We didn't use anything for our garden. However, our garden was full of beneficial bugs. We had some pretty massive spiders and spider webs, and they took care of plenty of bugs. There were ladybugs, ants, and we put some worms in there too when the bales started decomposing.
All in all, it was a great crop. We are very happy with our results. So next year hopefully we can get enough food to get us through most of the winter. I want to try to start growing enough food so that we won't have to buy anything like that from the grocery store. For example my father in law plants more than 100 bean seeds, we planted 36. He gets enough to get them to the next summer, we had enough to get us through the summer. I also talked to a farmer at our local farmer's market and asked them if they would sell us their "grade b" tomatoes for canning. They said "can you pick?" We said yes, but unfortunately never got to go get them. So that is still an idea for next year. I would like to do something like that for corn since we don't have enough room to grow corn. Hopefully we can find a farmer that will let us pick our own.
Anyway, at the end of the season, the bales really start to shrink down due to decomposing, great for the compost bin!
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