stawbale garden 2.0

year one

year 3

Hi! I am Tiffany and this is my gardening Blog. I decided that since not everyone loves hearing about how my garden grows i would seek out a group that does! for now that group includes.... just me but i read blogs so maybe someone will read mine... right? At the very least this will serve as a log for use next year. first a little background. i live in northeast Ohio with my wonderful girlfriend. we bought our home in june of 2009. that first year we started a garden and....Failed. we blamed it on the late start. the next year...... failed again. blamed it on... any and everything. year three, i insisted. we try an idea i saw in a magazine- a straw bale garden. my girlfriend thought i was nuts but she indulges my fancies.... so we got three bales and placed them in the far back of our yard. (we live on 1/3 of an acre, not a huge lot in some places, but pretty awesome for our small college town, especially since we are close to downtown.) the straw bales did ok. the other garden not so much. we were ready to give up and then...Eureka! my wonderful girlfriend remembered something from her childhood (we call her the country mouse, i however grew up in the city/suburbs of Cleveland and never even saw a deer till i was in my 20's) she realized our neighbors have several black walnut trees and she remembered that they are bad for gardens.... i looked it up and yeah they are terrible. they are like poison to almost everything we have tried to grow. and it gets worse. we composted all the leaves so all our compost is poison. our soil- poison. ugh! we have battled a groundhog from hell, deer, bunnies. we have dealt with limited sun and huge roots from our neighbors many trees, and now this? so we decided that this year may be our last. we have spent... LOTS on our gardening attempts and we dont want to give up... so this year we are doing all straw bales.  I added photos of our previous attempts and of the plan for this year.   we plan to reuse the three bales from last year, they are in what we call the "secret garden." We will plant peas in them on march 17th and then after harvesting them we will plant melons and pumpkins for a fall harvest.    the other bed, we will lay down cardboard, add 14 bales of straw. and we plan to grow: 6 cucumber plants, 3 Zucchinis, 3 tomatillos, 2 green pepper, 1 red pepper, 1 yellow pepper, 4 sweet banana peppers, 4 jalapeno peppers, lots of lettuce, 3 heads of cabbage, 3 broccoli plants,  6 assorted tomato plants, and in between the bales in topsoil, potatoes and onions. We will also plant the potatoes and onions on march 17th.  In my next post, I will discuss the challenges we have faced in more depth.... and ideas we have for overcoming them! goodnight!

strawbale 1.0

plan for garden 2012