‘Necessity is the mother of invention’

Editor’s note: The following is an edited excerpt from “Straw Bale Gardens Complete” by Joel Karsten. The portion selected provides background on this gardening method, which the author notes can be ideal for vegetable growing, and explains the benefits of straw bale vs. traditional gardening.

The Straw Bale Gardening Story II

Everyone has heard it said that “necessity is the mother of invention,” and I must agree. It was just after graduating from college, and hours after buying my first house, that I discovered my new home was surrounded with construction fill. Instead of the fertile farmland I grew up on, I found only clay, gravel, rocks and old bricks that had been graded, compacted and frosted with an inch of “blackish” topsoil.

Anyone with even a rudimentary working knowledge of growing plants could decipher the cards I’d been dealt. Planting anything in this “soil” would require a backhoe, a couple of months with a pick axe and several truck-loads of good quality compost to amend the “concrete” into a state where it might actually produce something. Rescuing this soil would be very expensive, so for a young, new homeowner with college loans to pay, it wasn’t an option.

While I didn’t have much money, I did have a fresh Bachelor of Science in Horticulture degree from the University of Minnesota, as well as some distinct memories of growing up on a small farm. There, we always seemed to have a few broken bales of straw that would get piled up along the side of the barn. After a few months of decomposing, the biggest, greenest, healthiest thistles on the whole farm would spring up from these bales. I wondered, even as a young boy, why the healthiest looking weeds were always the ones growing out of these old bales, but as a recent horticulture student I now knew. In my exhaustive study of soils, composting, plant physiology, and all things horticulture, I found that most mysteries, including why weeds grow in bales, can be explained by science — microbial soil science, to be exact. The old bales, I deduced, were composting inside, creating brand new soil. This provided a phenomenal growing environment for weeds. So why, then, couldn’t I use bales of straw to grow vegetables?

I decided to explore the question and I’ll say it again: “necessity is the mother of invention.” If I had been able to come up with $200 to build raised beds instead, you might well be reading a mystery novel right now, instead of this book called Straw Bale Gardens Complete.

The system I now like to call “SBG” wasn’t an instant success, unless you consider 15 years of experimenting and perfecting a method to be instant success. It’s not as simple as it might seem to some onlookers and many would-be bale-gardeners who don’t bother to learn the right method. “Well, you just buy a bale of straw and dig out the inside and put in a little dirt and then drop in the plants,” they conclude, “and Shazam! You have a garden.” Not exactly. I’ve seen what happens when it’s done this way, and it’s a disaster. The plants starve to death and the dirt brings in weed seeds and disease we are trying to avoid.

The truth is that my method isn’t really very complicated. The simplicity of the method, and the foolproof techniques I’ve developed, make vegetable gardening about as simple as following a recipe for baking cookies. You can deviate a little bit here and there, but if you want to be successful, make sure you adhere to the basics, or you’ll end up with a garden that only disappoints.
 

Step One: Set aside the skepticism

The fact is, growing vegetables in straw bales is a very radical idea to traditional gardeners and even folks who have tried other out-of-the-ground strategies, like container gardening and raised bed gardening. You naturally encounter some serious skepticism when you tell these people that you’ve invented a method that: takes 75 percent less time; uses less water; involves less bending; requires less pesticide and no weeding; and, on top of that, can be done anywhere, even on a rooftop without using any soil at all. Then, add that it can be done on a shoestring budget, and you can’t blame them if it sounds too good to be true.

“That’s impossible…vegetables require nutrients…nutrients are only available in the soil, so how can crops be as productive or as nutritious if they are not grown in the soil?” is a typical objection I hear. Once they listen to my explanation, read the book or hear my seminar, however, the skepticism subsides a bit. The real proof, though, is in the pudding. They need to try it for themselves, and this is where the real foundation of the Straw Bale Gardening movement has been built …

…Most find the simplicity to be appealing, and the no-weeding benefit gets a lot of attention, too. So does that fact that you can plant three or four weeks earlier in a bale than in the ground. But whatever reason draws the most interest, I’ve found that it’s not my evangelizing or even a book that has sold tens of thousands on the idea; it is simply those who have done it and are true “Bale-ievers” (my affectionate name for Straw Bale Gardening believers).
 

Photos courtesy of “Straw Bale Gardens Complete”