Episode 3417

- [Narrator] Straw bale gardening is a low-cost organic method that uses straw as both the garden bed and the growing medium. Here at Forevermore Farm in Lyles, Tennessee, the yields are gratifying, both for the bales situated on the ground and the bales positioned side-by-side in raised beds. Then Troy Martin shares his tried-and-true method for growing citrus in Zone 7 without a lot of fuss. So stay tuned. It's easier on the back and there's very little weeding, so maybe straw bale gardening is for you.

- We're at Forevermore Farm in Lyles, Tennessee today. We're gonna experience something new for me because I'm unfamiliar with this practice altogether. Straw bale gardening, and we're gonna visit with Conchetta West.

- Yep.

- Let's start with this meat and potatoes here.

- Yeah.

- How did you get this? First, tell me, how did you get started in this?

- Well, about 15 years ago, there's a gentleman by the name of Joel Karsten, and he really pioneered straw bale gardening. He wrote a book about it, and I attended a workshop at a Mother Earth Fair that was in Portland, well, outside of Portland, Oregon.

- And you moved from Washington, correct?

- I did.

- Okay.

- I did.

- And you've been in Tennessee how long?

- Four years.

- And did you do square bale gardening there then, I assume?

- I did, I've done square bale gardening or straw bale gardening for, I'd say the better part of 14 years.

- So in the very beginning, you started like this.

- Yep.

- Tell me how this goes.

- Well, what you have to do is, I prefer to start in the springtime. I get straw, which shouldn't be confused with hay bales. People sometimes don't understand the difference, but straw pretty much doesn't have the seed bed that hay has. So hay is designed for animals to like eat, and so they get their nutrition from those seed heads. So straw is pretty easy to work with. You don't have a lot of weed that comes up, but you have to condition the bale. So I usually put them out either into a row. So I've done long rows before, or these are done in squares because we're growing sweet potatoes here. So the meat and potatoes of it is that you can grow potatoes in it.

- Exactly.

- Yeah.

- So tell me how you get started. Okay, so you have your straw bale, and then what?

- Well, if you're doing it in an environment that's really dry, you need to sprinkle either with blood meal and bone meal or a high nitrogen fertilizer, and that's what we call conditioning the bales. And so you will sprinkle it on there, you'll water it, and you kind of go through that process for about 21 days. And the objective is to get the straw bale actually breaking down inside and creating a soil that's high in nitrogen that then can later feed the plants that you're planting or the seeds that you're planting into it.

- What all can you grow in this then other than the root?

- Oh my gosh, there is nothing I've found that you can't grow in these. As a matter of fact, I love it because it puts it at a level where you're not like hurting your back, you're not having to till soil. It works in an environment where if the soil isn't good quality or you have super high clay or really sandy soil, it doesn't matter 'cause the nutrition is coming from that nitrogen that you've built up into the straw bale that it can slowly release to the vegetables. And so I haven't found anything that you can't grow in it. This is just a regular potato, it's like a russet potato. And then these are sweet potatoes. And in this block, I like to do potatoes or carrots, beets and things like that because it allows you to have a greater surface area and it allows the plant that is actually producing something on its roots, such as potatoes, peanuts, sweet potatoes, things like that, to be able to actually fill the block up with whatever it grows. Yeah. And so you've already harvested your carrots, you said, and you have the sweet potatoes and then russet potatoes.

- Russet potatoes. And you can see what happens. This is a good example of how this just turns into soil. So what's happening is as the plant takes and starts to produce whatever it is, so sweet potato or potato, then the bales are gonna start to compress and it will actually turn into soil.

- And so when these break down, you said maybe two years you'd get out of each block?

- As long as it's not a root vegetable. So if I was just planting carrots, radishes, and things, beets that grow on the top, you can easily get two years out of it. Or if I had squash, peppers, tomatoes, anything like that. But when it's a root, such as a potato, you have to actually break apart the bale in order to harvest it.

- Okay.

- Yeah.

- And so when this does break down though, you don't throw it away.

- Oh no. Nope. So what I do is I transition it now. So this is something new because I was like, well, what am I gonna do with it? After years of doing it, I put it into like a compost heap, but now I just kind of cycle it into its own system. So we put it into raised beds. We add more straw to the raised beds. We use this then as a top dressing on it. And then it just becomes part of the whole mix.

- All right, I wanna see these raised beds now.

- Okay, sounds good.

- Before we talk about the plant material in here, tell me something about your raised beds. What is this?

- Well, I just got an inexpensive raised bed. They're about nine feet long, about four feet wide. I think I paid around $100 for them. I just found them online. And we decided to use those just to kind of give a little bit more structure. And so as we're taking a bale that is broken down, there is actually something to kind of hold it in. You could do wooden beds if you wanted to. Some people use just like this type of hog paneling, and they'll actually make a round bed or square beds with it, but this seemed to work for us.

- And you said this is one of your permanent beds, and tell me the plant material in here.

- Sure. So what you have here is a variety of mints, some wormwood, and actually a volunteer potato. I'm not sure how it got in here, but that's just the fun about gardening. And you'll see here deep inside, there's just the load from last year. And all I do is I take what comes out of those beds. And because mint is something that regenerates and it just wants to keep coming up to the surface, this is a great thing. A lot of herbs that are perennial herbs are great for this type of planting. So you can just take that when it's broken down and you've gotten all your potatoes harvested and place all of that on top of here. I do the same thing with asparagus. But with the asparagus, I do sprinkle radish seeds down, and then I will have radishes to eat or radishes to feed to our pet pigs.

- So your trellis here is simple hog fencing that you've bent and then used fence posts to contain it and hold it in this spot. What kind of, what do you have growing on here?

- I have a couple different varieties of cantaloupe that I like to grow. I really enjoy growing cantaloupe though here because in Washington State, you could never grow it.

- Not sunny enough?

- I don't know. I think that our growing season just isn't as long as it is here in Tennessee. And these guys will produce like crazy. By the end of the summer, this will actually be totally covered. And last year I harvested about 40 cantaloupe. And they were the sweetest, most delicious cantaloupe that I've ever eaten. I was giving them away and people were like, where did you get this? So delicious.

- What are the varieties you like to grow then?

- Well, this one is Hale's Best. And it's the one that I've had the most success with. I did plant a different variety last year and I don't know whether it was just the burden from pests was too great for it. But this one seemed to be a lot more resistant to any insects or any moth or anything that might get onto it. So that's what I continued with this year.

- Do you keep the straw at a certain level all through the season as it dissipates and deteriorates? Do you add more in the season or you wait till next year to do it again?

- I wait until next year to do it again.

- How tall is this you think?

- Oh, I think that's 24 inches tall. The key to doing the straw bale garden is making sure that you're planting it on the side that is actually open. You wouldn't wanna plant on the side that has the strapping that goes around it because you won't be able to push your seeds into it. And so these are all grown from seed. And basically you just put a couple of seeds down there. I normally will pull out any extras. I let the strongest one survive and then the rest of them I pull out or I give them away. But this will break down and then we'll start over again next year by just putting more on top. And once we get to the point where there's just no more room to put straw bales on top, then we'll settle for just composting. And my days of straw bale gardening might be coming to an end if that happens.

- Jeez, we wouldn't want that, would we?

- I don't want that to happen.

- So I see we have some oregano going in here too. Yes?

- Yeah.

- So you disperse other herbs. Is that a basil down there? Goes with the tomatoes.

- It does. Tomato and basil. Tell me about your tomatoes and how you care for them.

- Well, these are an indeterminate variety.

- Can you tell us what that means?

- Yeah. So they don't really have any boundaries. They will just continue growing. And so it's important to take and trim them back. So usually after a month or so, I go in, I'm always trimming off pieces of it so that the fruit gets all of the attention and not so much as going just to the foliage. And then I'm very careful to make sure that I'm not trimming off anything that is gonna actually produce a tomato. So you can see how these are coming up here. Every little bloom, that's gonna make a tomato. So I wanna make sure I'm careful not to remove those. But it is important with a tomato plant like this that you do keep it trimmed back.

- Well, this plant looks very happy right now. Tell me what's going on here.

- Butternut squash. So any type of squash that has this propensity to kind of go off into vining, you wanna take and place in the corners of a straw bale garden or on the ends in an area where it can actually do that or where it can go down an aisle way and you're not really disrupting it. 'Cause my goal with just having such a compact garden is to produce as much fruit or vegetable as I can off of just a very limited number of plants. So this one will produce probably 25 or 30 squash in its lifetime. And you can see that it actually, if you look down among these leaves, they're all over the place. They're just coming out. There's more of them forming.

- Well, I can see what you were talking about. It's important to put the squash at the corners or the end of the beds. Tell me what's going on here.

- Well, this is a spaghetti squash and it's kind of reaching its end of its maturity. And so you can see that it has a lot of fruit on it. Lots of spaghetti squash. They're ready to be harvested. I'm kind of not one though to take and actually rip out the plant. I learned a lesson last year in this environment. I had a little pumpkin, one of those sugar pumpkins and I thought, well, it's all done. I harvested all these pumpkins about this time of year. But I left the plant and thought, well, I'm gonna leave it. It started to grow more pumpkins and it took me all the way into November producing pumpkins.

- So it was happy that you picked it.

- It was. So I think I just needed to pick them. So that's what's gonna happen here really soon.

- There is a lot of fruit on this plant and I can't believe how far it's stretching. It's actually taking up the whole end of this fenced in area, isn't it?

- The entire width. And I think there's a good maybe 10 or more on the vine if you count everything that's underneath the leaves and stretching out.

- I can taste it right now.

- It's gonna be good.

- What are you adding to your beds throughout the year?

- Okay.

- Nutrition.

- Okay, throughout the year, I put fertilizer that is basically organic. So it comes from our rabbits. And the nice thing about rabbit or goat pellets or manure is that it doesn't burn anything. We haven't really had to do that because we're so early in the growing season.

- Are you making like a tea with it or are you just sprinkling?

- I just sprinkle it around. And then as it rains or as we water, it's kind of like a slow feeding fertilizer.

- These beans are very happy. Is this first planting or tell me about how you do that.

- Well, this is succession planting. So this is the second planting of beans. And they're pretty easy to grow. The same thing with snap peas, anything that you would traditionally kind of grow as a succession planting works really well with straw bale gardening. Because the straw bales do hold a lot of moisture, it's really easy for those seeds to take start. And so you just simply would plant the beans down and poke them in with your finger.

- You said you just poke a hole and you put the seeds in.

- Yeah, you do. And then you make sure they're watered, but we've had so much rain that really it hasn't been an issue. They just came up on their own. And you can see that they are really happy 'cause there are all of the flowers and each of these flowers are what's gonna turn into beans again.

- Okay, again, like your squash, you planted the watermelon at the end of the bed or in the corner. And tell me why you do that again. You let this sprawl out and take its own space.

- I do. And the thing is with a commercial operation, they would really be cutting this back. And so the watermelon plant would not nearly grow and reach out like this one does. But what I've learned is that I can continue growing them throughout the season as this gets ripe. And these are getting ready. Like you can see right down here how beautiful they are. And as this gets more ripe, we'll know because there will be a little tendril that will turn brown. We'll have to cut it off. That'll signal, I think, to the plant to start producing again. And there are other little baby watermelons that are all along these vines, but this is the best way of doing it for me just because I don't want it to overtake the rest of the straw bale garden.

- Yeah, that would be hard to do anything really.

- Yeah.

- We're standing in front of your cucumbers. Tell me why you think this is the way to go with the trellising.

- I like this raised bed format and the trellising because it allows kind of a structure that's already built in. And so if you didn't wanna sink posts into the ground, the beds themselves would actually help hold tension on these bales and on against them, I guess is what you would say. And so with these, I think you have more success with growing things that need a trellis. If you had just a regular garden, you would probably try to trellis with a teepee shape or something like that. But this allows more sun exposure. It allows bees then to be able to get to all of the flowers. And so then these can develop actually into cucumbers. And you can see here that there are cucumbers. These are two different varieties. This is more of a pickling type of cucumber. And so they're a little bit smaller. And then this one over here is more of an eating cucumber. And so you can see right under there, and these ones will get a lot bigger, but having the two different varieties, I think it gives the bees something that they're really looking for. And then I end up reaping those rewards because I have so many cucumbers growing on the plant.

- So tell me why you haven't pulled these. You wanted us to see this because?

- Well, I want people to see what the alternatives are when you are not going to take and keep putting straw bales in there. So this is actually an asparagus bed. You can see that it's just now gone to bloom. You know, it basically is producing the fern part of it or the fronds. And so they're all throughout here, but I did leave a couple so that you could see what that looks like. This is what this bed looked like before we put straw bales into it.

- Okay.

- And so this is just a bed where broken down straw bales from the sweet potatoes or the potatoes from last year were piled on top of those crowns that are used for the asparagus. So you can harvest your asparagus through it. Keep adding organic matter over the top of it. And then if you want to, I like to grow these radishes 'cause I have pet pigs. And so they like to have the radishes. And so this is a great way because I just sprinkle them on to there and it'll grow these little radishes.

- That's a big radish.

- Well, that one is a big radish. But you can see then that it produces something just on the top. And you could do this over and over again 'cause this is a succession planting as well, just like carrots and peas and beans. So you could succession plant also with the radishes. And this is a really big one, y'all.

- Oh, wow.

- It's crazy, right? But look at it, it's turning into soil. And so this year, when we're all done with those bales that have the potatoes in it, we'll use it on top of this bed and on top of the beds that are permanent beds in order to just fortify it and give them more building up the beds. And pretty soon, I'm sure after a few more years of doing this, the soil level will be up here.

- Okay. I don't notice very many weeds. Tell me about the weed control in the straw.

- Oh, the greatest thing about straw bale gardening is that you just don't have the weed, you don't have the weed bed or the seed bed. Whereas traditional gardening, every time you cultivate or stir up the soil, those seeds then wanna germinate. But because it's straw, straw is actually the byproduct of wheat production or other grains. And so there really isn't that much seed in it. Anything that comes up as a weed is really like wheat grass, easy to pull out. Sometimes I don't even pull them out because they self terminate. But this is a great way to not have to really deal with the weeds and the daily weeding it.

- This is one of your permanent beds here as well, correct?

- It is, it's one of my permanent beds. So this one will stay strawberries. And you can see that the bed is starting to break down. So these were plants that I had grown and then planted into here. And this is gonna compress down. So we'll compress it down and then put more on top of it. And each year we'll just keep building up. And strawberries are another plant that's really good at finding the light and reaching for it. And so I think next year, this bed will really be producing quite heavily.

- And it should be really almost full.

- It should be almost full.

- If I lived in the city, where would I get the straw?

- Tractor supply. You can get it at tractor supply. I ordered some, like an entire truckload because I go through so much. We have a full on farm here. And so in order to fill all of these and then use it, I actually ordered it by the truckload. But it's a reasonable and cost-effective way of actually filling raised beds. I had a friend who put in the same raised beds and she did maybe three of them. And it costs several hundred dollars for the soil to be able to actually put into that. So it's more economical. I also think that this is just a great alternative. If you don't have a raised bed, you can still just use a straw bale. You could do it in the city. You could do it on a balcony. You can just set them up in your backyard. So I feel like it brings gardening to somebody who maybe otherwise wouldn't be able to garden.

- I think it's important to say you have high yield, high production in this small space because I see grapes, I see strawberries, I see blueberries. Everything's growing here. You have really, you can never go to the grocery store for your produce.

- I would like that as a matter of fact. But I think the beauty of it is that everything grows so well in a straw bale. It eliminates a lot of the challenges that you might have in just growing in the soil. And I love the fact that I can just eat right out of my garden.

- I thank you for sharing and for sharing with our viewers. They might wanna give this a try as well.

- I would love that. I would love that if this inspires somebody or it gives them at least the idea that they could do it more easily.

- Thank you.

- Thank you.

- Did you know it's lemon harvest time in Tennessee? Did you know you could even grow lemons in Tennessee? Well, you certainly can as a house plant during the winter, obviously, or I have a couple of interesting ways that you can overwinter your lemon trees or other citrus for that matter. This is a big variegated lemon here next to me that I've just cut these two fruit off of and I have several more to harvest. But I also have lime trees, I have a navel orange, I have another sweet orange, and a couple of others. And I have learned a really good way of overwintering these without having to drag them in my house, actually. I'm lucky that I have a storage room on the back of my house, and I also have a garden shed. And these citrus actually overwinter in my garden shed unheated. I have a small space heater that if it gets down into the teens and I think the interior of the garden shed might freeze hard, I start that small space heater, run it for overnight for however many nights it's going to be in the teens, and then I shut it off. There are a couple of advantages to that. It keeps the trees dormant. You can see that these have actually, some of them, lost their leaves for the winter. And that is okay. The stems are green, clear to the top. I moved these out a couple of days ago, and in two or three weeks, you'll never know they were leafless. They'll have all new growth on them. It also really encourages them to flower. This is the navel orange down here, this little short one, and you can see that it is loaded with flower buds. I won't let very many of these develop if it sets fruit at all because the tree is still pretty small. I might let two or three mature on this, and then more as the tree gets bigger. Every tree that you see here started in a one-gallon pot, less than 12 inches tall. These smaller trees are about two to three years old, and just coming into being bearing age. And the big variegated lemon that we started on, I've had for about a decade. It's about, sitting in its pot, it's about eight feet tall, and about four and a half feet wide. And that is as big as I will let it get because that is the size that will, if you are careful and bend the branches inward just a little bit, it will fit in through a standard size doorway. And that's how I can get it in and out for the winter months. So these actually do overwinter in my garden shed, as I said before, and I just don't let them freeze hard. They will tolerate 35 degrees with no problem at all. The other thing that that does is it keeps my pest population down to a bare minimum in the wintertime. Anybody who has tried to grow citrus indoors as a house plant knows that all winter long you fight spider mites, you fight scale insects, and you fight mealy bugs. If you can overwinter them in a cold situation, cold enough to keep the bug population at bay, you'll have a much easier time of it. My other trick is that about a month before these go indoors for the winter, which is usually at the end of October, first of November, I spray them every week with safer insecticidal soap. So that's something that you can use safely, safe for you, safe for your pets, safe for the fruit. And that smothers a lot of those mealy bugs and spider mites and scale insects so that you're not bringing them indoors with you. As you can see, most of my citrus trees are growing in clay pots, especially as they get larger. There are a couple of reasons for this. The roots like to be able to breathe and the clay pots can breathe, whereas plastic pots don't. The other thing is, once these trees are up five, six, seven feet tall, the weight of the clay pot helps to keep them from blowing over. If they're in plastic pots, they get very top heavy very quickly. And every time the wind blows out here on my hill, they're all laying on the ground and they're a little bit brittle. So I like to not have that happen if we can help it. Now, just up here, this is the new crop of flowers coming on for this spring. And there are little flower buds emerging all over the plant. So not only have the lemons turned yellow, the mature ones turned yellow, but the new crop is starting. And that's one of the ways you know that it's time to harvest. And if you look just here, you'll see a tiny little lemon. That's next year's lemon starting now at the end of March. And it will take about nine months for them to ripen. So I'll be able to start harvesting these in about early December, and they will continue to ripen through the winter. And once they're ripe, they can actually hang on the tree for three or four months and not spoil. So you can, once they've turned yellow, you can just leave them hanging on the tree and harvest them as you need them and have a fresh supply of lemons all winter long.

- [Narrator] For inspiring garden tours, growing tips and garden projects, visit our website at volunteergardener.org and find us on these platforms.