Straw Bale Gardening Presentation at the Minnesota State Fair

Hi, everyone. We’re on location at the Minnesota State Fair, the Great Minnesota Get-Together, where a couple million friends and I get together every August for about 10 days. 

I’m gonna do a couple presentations here today, one at The Common Table about straw bale gardening, and another on The Dirt Stage, which is the University of Minnesota’s Extension Outreach stage. We’re gonna talk to a whole bunch of gardening rookies, try to teach ’em a little somethin’ about straw bale gardening. I think you’ll really like this. Come along and join me! 

Welcome, everyone, to the Straw Bale Garden presentation. Before we get goin’, I just wanna introduce myself real quickly. My name is Joel Karsten. I’m originally from down by Worthington, Minnesota, if you know where that is, down in the southwest part of the state, and I grew up on a crop and dairy farm. 

And 35 years ago, when you were a young boy growin’ up on a crop and dairy farm, that meant one thing. It meant you spent most of your summer riding on a baling rack. You baled three rounds of hay for your dad, then you baled three rounds of hay for all the neighbors who your dad volunteered you for, and you baled one round of straw. For us, on the farm, it was oat straw. For other farmers, it could be barley straw or wheat straw. 

Straw is, of course, bedding material for livestock, where hay, many people are familiar with hay, that’s food for livestock. It’s usually green in color. Straw is usually golden or yellow in color. It comes from the small grains, the cereal grains. Once the grain’s been harvested, we bale the straw. The straw is usually a little lighter than hay. 

So you get to be about 10 years old, and you’re big enough and strong enough that you can hoist a bale five high, then Dad lets you stack a rack all by yourself, and for a little farm kid, that’s always a proud day. But you don’t quite have the geometry mastered yet at 10 years old, so your bales aren’t real tight. By the time that rack gets back to the barn, it’s pretty jiggly. One of the bales would always tip off the top, bounce on the ground, and break a string. So Dad would take that bale and he’d throw it up against the barn and he’d say, “Just leave that one lay there, and we’ll come back and get it later.” That bale would get rained on within a couple days. It was then worthless for a dairy farmer. ‘Cause you never put a wet diaper on your baby. You’d never bed your livestock with pre-wetted straw! 

I would notice, even as a little kid, that six months down the road, or by the following spring, great big tall thistles would start to grow out of those bales that would be left by the barn! And I would ask my grandma, “How come this happens?” And she would say, “Well, there’s moisture trapped inside those bales, and as that bale decomposes, it gives off nutrients and provides moisture. So all summer long, those thistles are getting extra moisture. That’s why they’re so much bigger than all the other weeds.” 

Now we fast-forward about 15 years and I graduate from the University of Minnesota with a bachelor’s degree in horticulture, and I buy my first house. 

Now, when you have a degree in horticulture and you buy a house, your first instinct when that moving van pulls up is to grab your shovel and run to the backyard and dig some holes, because what you’re really curious about, as a horticulturist, is what kind of soil did you buy? 

Turns out, I didn’t buy very much soil. I bought this much soil. Underneath was all construction dirt, this compacted clay and gravel. 

I had another big problem. I had just graduated college and I had just bought my first house. I was broke! I didn’t have 200 bucks to build raised beds, which is what most people would do! 

But I did have a little more knowledge, and I knew what happened inside those straw bales that used to lay by the barn. I knew that as they decomposed, they turned into soil, and they gave off a specific nutrient profile that happened to appeal to thistles. Turns out that thistles take the same basic nutrients as tomatoes and peppers! So I called my dad and I said, “I can’t afford to build raised beds, but I think I’m gonna get some straw bales, and I’m gonna try growing vegetables in those.” And he said, “Well, you should call around, and ask your old professors if they think it’ll work.” 

So I called the University of Minnesota and I asked my professors, and told them what I was gonna do. And I said, “I have this brilliant idea. I wanna use a straw bale to grow vegetables!” “Well, that’ll never work,” they said. “Your plants will tip over, there won’t be the right nutrients, it’s not gonna work. It’s gonna dry out too much,” they said, “but you know, we’ve never tried it before. Why don’t you call down to Texas A&M University and ask Texas A&M whether they’ve ever done it. They’re very progressive down there and they have a lot of wheat in West Texas,” so I called A&M. First professor I talked to said, “That’ll never work, but why don’t you call Georgia Tech? They’re very progressive there. Maybe somebody there has tried it.” So I called Georgia Tech and they said, “Penn State is the place to call. They’ll know everything.” And the people at Penn State told me to call the University of Minnesota! 

So I went in a big circle and I learned nothing from academia; no one had ever done it before! 

So out of frustration, I called my dad and I said, “This is what I wanna do.” And I said, “What do you think? Do you think this’ll work?” And he said, “Well, I’m not a professor. I’m just an old farmer. What are you out if it doesn’t work? Aren’t you just out a few bales of straw?” And I said, “Yeah, that’s a good point.” 

So I went down to the farm the next weekend, 22 years ago this spring. As I drove up on the farm place, he has a whole hay rack stacked full of straw bales. I said, “Dad I was thinkin’ of trying three or four bales, just to see if it would work!” And he said, “I know,” but he said, “I got 50 bales,” said, “We’ll set up 10 plots with 5 bales in each plot, and we’ll try different techniques on each plot of bales. And we’ll see what might work!” 

We put a control group of vegetables in the soil. Now down at the farm, we have three feet of sandy loam. Some of the most productive soil on planet Earth, in Nobles County, Minnesota. 

By the middle of June that first summer, we realized we really had something in the straw bales. The average vegetable coming out of the straw bales was about twice as vigorous as the vegetables comin’ out of the soil! 

And by the end of August, he called me and he said, “That’s it, kid, no more straw bale gardening at the farm. I can’t take it.” And I said, “Well, what’s wrong? I thought it was goin’ so well!” And he said, “Oh, the vegetable garden’s doin’ great, but,” he said, “you put straw bales in your front yard and you start plantin’ tomatoes in ’em, and all of a sudden people start pullin’ up in the yard and knockin’ on your door and they wanna know what you’re doin’.” He said, “It takes your mother or I an hour, half an hour to an hour, to explain everything!” And he said, “We don’t really know what you’re doin’. So either write all this stuff down so we can hand it out to people, or build a fence so that nobody can see that garden.” And he said, “They’ll stop asking questions.” 

So I wrote everything down. That little pamphlet that I wrote, for about 14 years, served as sort of the guide, for lots of people who started doing straw bale gardening. And then, along came this little thing called Facebook. And I put a little pamphlet I’d written, a self-published little booklet, about 68 pages long, with a bunch of pictures I’d taken over the years, and I put it for sale on Facebook and it just exploded. 

All over planet Earth, people started growing straw bale gardens, and then they’d come back and put pictures on Facebook, and now we have 100,000 gardeners now on Facebook that are doing straw bale gardening, from all over! 

The little pamphlet became a book called “Straw Bale Gardens,” on Cool Springs Press, and the day it was published, seven days later, it got a full-page review in “The New York Times.” And the book exploded. 

Now it’s in 17 different languages all over the Earth, and the second edition just came out in March of this year, and it’s been the number-one-selling gardening book on Earth since it was published originally in March of 2013. 

So straw bale gardening has become popular! Not just because of me, or because of the books I wrote, but because it works. 

And because when you put bales in your yard and you start growing vegetables out of ’em, people are gonna notice. And they’re gonna stop by and they’re gonna ask you, “How does that work? What are you doing? Tell me how it works!” And then you’re gonna teach them how to do it, and then they teach somebody else, and that’s kinda how it started. 

For the first 14 years, it was a self-published little booklet, and a few friends and relatives. It’s only the last seven or eight years where it’s really taken off and started to explode. And let’s talk a little bit about the reasons why. There are some good reasons why straw bale gardening is what it is, and is successful. 

When we talk about straw bale gardening, and we break it down to its real fundamentals, what we’re talking about is a container garden. The straw bale is gonna serve as both the container and the media, that normally you would buy to fill up your containers. That’s all inside the straw bale. So we never add soil to our straw bale garden. The straw turns into soil. The outside edges of the bale, that forms what we call a crust, I call the crust, of the bale. Because the sun shines on the outside of the bale and the wind blows on the outside of the bale. It dries out quickly, that outside layer. So even by the end of the first year, the outside layer of the bale is still gonna look like straw, but the inside isn’t. The inside of the bale very rapidly begins to decompose. 

Now, if we left Mother Nature to her own devices, she would do the work of decomposing that bale, but it would take her a while, six months, maybe eight months. 

We’re gonna make that happen in two weeks! And we do that by accelerating Mother Nature’s natural process, which is to build up insects and worms, and to build up mold and fungi, mushrooms, and also bacteria. 

Bacteria’s the real heavy lifter of all decomposers. And very rapidly, the bacteria’s gonna colonize the inside of that bale. We’re gonna encourage that process by adding some nitrogen, which is what bacteria eats. If you’re an organic gardener, that’s gonna be blood meal, if you’re a traditional gardener, it’s just gonna be lawn fertilizer, will work as well. You’ll see the inside of the bale very rapidly becomes soil. 

So the big misleading thing about straw bale gardening is, people drive by and they see straw bales in your yard with vegetables growing out of them, they say, “Oh, you’re growing stuff out of straw bales!” Well, yes and no. It was straw at one time. But the inside of the bale has very quickly become compost or soil! 

All good black soil is made from a high percentage of decomposed organic material, so something that at one time was alive, decomposes and becomes what we recognize as soil, which is really just a mineral and organic material mixture of free ions, free radicals that can be absorbed, molecules that can be reabsorbed by the roots of another plant. That’s what happens inside the bale. 

It’s relatively inexpensive to straw bale garden, especially if you compare it with other types of raised-bed or container gardening. If you can imagine, a container the size of a straw bale? That’s an expensive container! Now you have to buy six or seven bags of potting mix to fill up your container. So you’ve got a big investment if you’re gonna build a raised-bed container the same size as a straw bale. Straw bales are gonna cost you 5 or $6. So it’s relatively inexpensive. 

It’s raised up off the ground. That’s a really big advantage for straw bale gardening. If you’re what I call a seasoned gardener, some of you’s been doin’ this for a few years, you get to the point where the physical difficulty of bending over and getting down on the ground to garden can become difficult and become a limiting factor! 

I just spoke at the Wisconsin Garden Expo last February, on Valentine’s Day, actually, and I had a woman come up and sit right next to my projector and she brought her scrapbook with her, so I knew she was a straw bale gardener, and she showed me her pictures of the last two years of her garden, and she said, “You know, I’ll plant again this year in May, and in June, I turn 96!” So she’s still gardening in straw bales at 94, 95, and 96 years old. That’s pretty good! So it definitely allows easier access. 

The hard work of straw bale gardening is getting the bales to the backyard. Once you’ve done that, it’s pretty easy! You can do the rest of the season with a hand trowel! That’s really all you need to do your gardening. There’s none of that heavy lifting. You don’t have to use a shovel. 

So it’s much easier for people with physical disabilities, especially if they get around in a chair, wheelchair, it’s a great way for them to garden out the side of a wheelchair, also. 

The number one reason people like straw bale gardening, above all others, especially at this time of year, you get a group of vegetable gardeners together, and it’s been a rainy year, so lots of water. What do they all complain about? Pulling weeds all summer, right? That’s all we did was pull weeds. If you have a beautiful vegetable garden, you pulled a lot of weeds during the summer. 

Straw bale gardening, no weeding! Absolutely no weeding. Now you might have a few leftover seeds in that bale from your oats or wheat harvest, that were left behind by the harvesting process. You might get a couple sprouts, a few oats or wheat sprouts out of the bale. You pluck those out early on, and you’re really done weeding for the rest of the year. 

If you dig a shovel of soil out of your garden and put it under a microscope, there’s gonna be thousands of weed seeds in there. But this brand new soil that’s being created inside of our straw bale, it’s completely weed-seed-free! There are no weed seeds. There’s also no disease, or no insect problems left, like there might be in your soil, there’s none of that in this brand new soil inside the straw bale. So the biggest advantage is the fact that there’s no weeding. I told people in my first book I wrote that if you gave yourself 30 seconds per summer per bale, that would take care of all your weeding. And I got a letter back from this lady and she said, “I read that paragraph out loud to my husband, and he just laughed at me and said, ‘Yeah, I’ve heard this song and dance before, and then I pull weeds all summer.'” She said, “I’m writing to tell you we had 30 bales in our straw bale garden.” She said, “We only remember pulling three weeds the whole summer; it was completely weed-free.” So if you’ve been a vegetable gardener, and you’ve spent your summers pulling weeds, try straw bale gardening. It’ll change your life when it comes to weeding. Another big advantage of straw bale gardening is the fact that it holds moisture really well. We know it works for this, ’cause farmers have used it as bedding material for livestock for a thousand years! But have you ever thought about why? Why does straw do such a good job of bedding livestock and capturing and holding moisture? It’s all about physics. If you look at the stalk of oats or wheat or barley, the stalk is a long, narrow, hollow stem, and the water droplets will get inside that long narrow stem because of an attraction, a natural attraction called adhesion. Water droplets are charged and they’re attracted to that surface inside the tube. When the whole tube of straw is filled with water, you can try and shake it, and it won’t come out. It doesn’t come out because of cohesion. Water droplets are attracted to each other. If you’ve ever had a cocktail with a cocktail straw, and you see the end of the straw, how that drip hangs on the end, that’s adhesion and cohesion at work in your cocktail straw. It’s the same reason that straw will fill up with moisture! So a farmer throws the bale in with his pigs or cows, and it absorbs moisture for a couple weeks. When it’s fully saturated, completely wet, then he sends his son in there with a pitchfork to put all heavy wet straw into the manure spreader and haul it away, so it’s really a transport device, kind of like a diaper for our livestock! We like the fact that straw holds moisture, because we’re gonna keep lots of vegetable roots in that bale! And we need a steady supply of moisture for those roots. So straw does a great job of capturing and holding moisture. From three to five gallons of water will get trapped inside that bale, and the bale will hold onto that water. You can tell, when you go up and lift a heavy, wet bale of straw, it gets really, really heavy. Well, that’s what makes it heavy, is all that moisture inside there. The great thing about straw bales, however, is you can’t flood ’em! They hold lots of moisture, but once they’re fully saturated, if you put another cup of water on, it runs right out the bottom of the bale. So you can never flood a straw bale garden, which is a big advantage. There’s lots of air spaces inside of a straw bale. We don’t think about air spaces a lot when we’re gardening in the soil, because you can’t see ’em! We’re planting and digging in the soil, but we don’t necessarily think about the air spaces. But trust me, if there’s no air spaces in your soil, nothing will grow! Excuse me. It’s a little hot. Inside of our straw bale, there’s lots of air spaces, and we don’t ever have to worry about anybody walking on or running over our bales with a wheelbarrow and compacting it. The air spaces stay there all during this growing season, and it allows root development throughout that entire bale. You’ll get faster early-season root production, which gives you larger roots later in the season when that plant calls for nutrients and calls for moisture, and has a larger root reservoir to draw up those nutrients and moisture. So air spaces inside of a straw bale are really important, as well. Lots of nutrients inside a bale of straw! Well, where do the nutrients come from? They come from the straw! Because last summer, Mother Nature grew the oats. Well, how does she grow oats? She takes from the soil nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, the macronutrients that all plant life on Earth need to survive, and then she adds to it micronutrients, things like iron, magnesium, molybdenum, zinc, in just trace amounts, and she grows the oats! We harvest a few seeds and send ’em to market, but then all the rest of those molecules are still trapped inside the cells of that stalk of oats or wheat. All we need is for Mother Nature to help us deconstruct what last summer she constructed. She constructed oats last summer, built those cells out of those molecules. This summer, she’s gonna help us deconstruct those cells back into molecular form. As soon as the cells are deconstructed back to molecules, now those molecules can be reabsorbed again. This is recycling at its best! This is Mother Nature’s fundamental job, is to decompose anything that’s ever been alive back into soil, even us! Eventually, someday, we return to soil, and then a plant root can come along and reabsorb all those molecules and make something else. This is what’s happening inside that bale, it’s decomposing back to molecular level, then being reabsorbed again! Straw bales are lightweight. 14 cubic feet in an average straw bale, weighs about 40 pounds. If you compared 14 cubic feet of soil, that weighs about 560 pounds. So it’s much lighter to do a garden out of straw bales. If you’re gonna do it on your rooftop, I have people all over Europe that garden on their rooftop. It’s not as popular here. Some places, big cities like New York, we actually had a restaurant in Rochester, Minnesota, that did a garden on their rooftop. So it’s becoming more popular. But in Europe, lots of people garden on their rooftop. And you can haul a bunch of straw bales up there, and you don’t even have to call an engineer! If you’re gonna haul that much soil up there, you better make sure your building’s gonna hold up all that weight, because it can be much heavier. Gardening in straw bales gives you lots of flexibility. If you’re a renter, do you wanna plant your garden in the soil in May, if you might not get your lease renewed in June or July? I wouldn’t wanna do that. So if I were a renter, and I wasn’t sure, I would plant my garden in bales on top of a couple of pallets, and if I had to, have ’em load my couch and load my garden right in the back of the moving van, and take it with me. It makes your garden portable, from that standpoint. We see this happen all the time. You can also have the flexibility of putting several pallets, and lifting your garden up. If you really have back issues and you can’t bend over at all, it makes it an elevated surface, and it really costs almost nothing. You can get pallets for free if you’re patient enough. It gives you lots of flexibility in terms of wrapping the bale. I like to put flowers in the sides of mine to make ’em look nice, especially if they’re close by a patio area or something, but there are lots of places now that make containers, wooden containers, that are made to fit a straw bale right inside, if you don’t like the look of a straw bale, or your neighbors don’t like the look of the straw bale. I just like to add some herbs and things to the sides and make it look nice on the side. There’s no soil required to do this. So you can do this in a parking lot if you want to, on concrete or asphalt! All you need is sun and water, and some straw bales. And lay ’em out on a paved surface, and you can plant a garden right in a parking lot, if you desire to do that. The picture on the right is a picture that was taken 15 feet outside the back door of the Penn State University Cooperative Extension Service office at Penn State, which is the same office I mentioned earlier, that I called 22 years ago to ask them if they knew anything about straw bales, and growing vegetables in straw bales, and they said they didn’t know anything about it, now they’re very well-educated, and all the gals in the office there, the 4-H office, grow a garden in their parking lot right outside their back door so they can go out there and pick tomatoes for lunch, et cetera. So it’s very ironic, that picture. You don’t have to worry about crop rotation with straw bale gardening, because you’re making new soil. So you can put a new bale right in that spot every year, and you can always grow a tomato in that same spot. So if you have a small yard and an even smaller area where you get sun, this is a great way to not have to worry about crop rotation, and plant all the same vegetables that you like every year. So there’s no rotation needed because it’s making new soil. We are not relying on our existing soil. Better air flow around our plants. When you plant on top of a bale that’s about 20 inches high off the ground, you’re gonna put the bales end-to-end in a row, and you’re usually gonna put sort of a row of plants down on the top of the bales, it spreads the plants out more and you get better air circulation. The other way we get better air circulation is to build a trellis up above the bales, and we let all the vines of our tomatoes and our beans and peas and cucumbers, we let all those climb up on that trellis. That gives us better air circulation around the plant. And with better air circulation, you’ll have less disease, and fewer insect problems on your plants. Insects don’t like to lay their eggs on dry leaf surfaces. They like a nice, moist leaf. So if you keep the leaves nice and dry with better air circulation, you won’t have that problem. The other way we prevent disease is how we water. We don’t use overhead kind of irrigation. We use a soaker hose, or a dripper-style hose, down the length of the bale. This way, we can put an emitter right next to each plant, or weave our soaker hose around the plants, and it just puts water right on the roots. So we’re not watering the walkways in between our rows of plants, we’re not watering the whole area, we’re just putting water on the roots. You’ll see it conserves moisture that way, conserves water. This summer, I talked to lots of straw bale gardeners that haven’t even watered their gardens at all, all summer, because we’ve gotten enough rain. So it really holds onto moisture very well. It’s easier to see problems when they’re raised up in the air. What I mean by that is if you have a cucumber field down on the ground, if you get beetles or other kinds of thrips or aphids, you’re gonna have to wait a while before you finally see them emerge, because you’re not gonna go along and pick up the vines and look underneath. If those vines are hanging up on a trellis above your straw bales, you’re gonna walk right by those vines every day when you walk through your garden, and you’re gonna see any insect problems as soon as they occur. Now when you treat them, you get to spray this side of the trellis, go to the other side and spray that side. If you spray ’em when they’re on the ground, you only get the tops of the leaves, and it’s hard to get the bottoms of the leaves. This gives you better treatment as well, so you can use pretty innocuous, organic type pesticides, insecticidal soaps, things like that, and they’ll do a really good job, ’cause you get a much more thorough coverage, using these trellises. Probably the biggest advantage for Northern gardeners, in particular, of straw bale gardening, is the fact that these bales heat up. Now God knows, we don’t need heat this time of year. But earlier in the spring, in May, when you go to plant your tomatoes, in the soil, the first, second week in May, your soil could be 50 degrees, 45 degrees. You plant a tomato in 45-degree soil, it just sits there and shivers until the beginning of June, then it starts to grow, when the soil gets to about 68. When we condition our straw bales, and get them prepared to plant, they’re gonna get really warm inside. And that warmth allows us to plant our tomato in the beginning of May when our bale is 90 degrees, 80 or 90 degrees! So it’s a big jumpstart on the season. You get much more rapid, early-season root production on those warm-season crops. Now if it gets cold at night, usually we’d run out there in our pajamas with our milk jugs and cover things up. We don’t have to do that with a straw bale garden, ’cause we simply pull a little plastic cover that we put between the fence post at the end of the row of bales and a little wire, we drape some plastic over that and pull it down to cover up the bale. That holds in the heat that’s being emitted out of the bale and protects your plants from frost. So you can get planted much earlier in the spring than you normally would, growing things that normally you wouldn’t be able to grow this far north. Just that extra couple weeks of season will extend your season year. Tomatoes will be ripe much earlier than they normally are, and you’ll tend to be able to grow things like sweet potatoes that are much harder to grow this far north than they are if you go about 400 or 500 miles south of here. Leftover straw provides an amazing opportunity. You can use it as mulch around other parts of your garden or as compost to till into other soils to help improve those soils, or use it, I use a lot of it around my perennials, just to keep the weeds down. The mulch made out of your straw bales is nice and clean, weed-free, works great for that, holds in the moisture, adds fertility, all the good things. As the book and the method have become more popular around the world, I get emails from people. With 100,000 people on Facebook, you can imagine how many emails I get in the spring. So I get lots of questions from people. One of the common complaints I get is, “I can’t find straw bales where I live.” Minnesota, we’re pretty lucky here. We usually can find oats or wheat straw bales pretty easily. But there are some parts of the world where they can’t find straw bales. So I came up with a little technique a couple years ago, and it’s in the latest version of my book, about how you can use your leftover bales from last year, or, if you can’t find a source of straw bales, you can make your own. Well, how are you gonna make bales? Don’t you have to have a baler to make straw bales? Yes, you do, and I’m gonna show you how you can make a baler for under $15 outta three two-by-sixes. It’s actually pretty easy. This is what your bales are gonna look like when they come out of a big giant Rubbermaid tub. I tell people to dump your Christmas decorations out and use that big giant Rubbermaid tub to make some bales in the spring of the year. So I collect all my grass clippings, I collect leaves, I collect trimmings off of the tree, my peelings from in the house, anything you normally would put in your compost pile, you’re gonna put in these bales, and make your own bales to grow your vegetables. How you do this, to begin with, is put your tub down. I want you to put a couple strings in the bottom with a couple pieces of tape. Then you’re gonna use your baler to squish that material really tight. We show you how to do this on the website. You can also, if you get a copy of my book, you can see there’s a step-by-step how to make the baler, as well. It’s really made out of three two-by-sixes, about $15 to make it. Fill it full of a mixture of material. You don’t wanna make a bale out of all leaves or all grass clippings. You wanna mix things together, some green and some brown and some vegetable peelings, and my tulip poles and my spent dahlia stalks, anything goes in there and squish it tight. The trick here is you have to squish this really tight. It’s not like a compost pile, ’cause we’re not gonna be able to turn it with a fork. So you need to pre-squeeze it, get it really tight, so it doesn’t collapse very much. It’ll decompose a little bit, it’ll collapse about 20, 25%, but a normal compost pile will collapse about 60, 70%, sometimes 80%! We don’t want that, because it will make holes inside the bale, and your roots will be exposed. So squeeze it really tight. If even a small person gets on the end of an eight-foot-long two-by-six, you can get a lot of pressure on that bale. These bales that come out of these 50-quart Rubbermaid tubs will weigh between 80 and 100 pounds when you squish ’em really tight. So they’re very dense, much more dense than a typical straw bale. I’ve put a fork of pine needles in there, I put a fork of pine cones, whatever you’ve got that will decompose can go in there! It doesn’t have to be straw. I do use leftover straw from last year’s straw bale garden, kinda mix that in as well. When I get it really compressed, squeeze it really tight, till you can’t get any more in there, wrap the strings up, tie the strings up around it, and I want you to drag that bucket wherever you wanna have your garden and dump it out. Wherever you dump it out, that’s where your garden’s gonna be, ’cause these are really hard to move. Now, if you tried to plant in that bale, it wouldn’t work very well, because there’s lots of short fibers in there and the bale would sort of crumble apart. Even though it’s dense, it would come apart. So to fix that, we need to wrap this bale with chicken wire. Just put a length of chicken wire all the way around the bale and cut it off, and then get a two-by-two, or a stick, or piece of board, whatever you have, with a sharp end, and let the sharp end stick out the bottom of the chicken wire about four, five inches, and staple the chicken wire onto the board and then twist it. When you twist that board, it wraps that chicken wire really tight around the bale and squeezes it. And now, when you get it tight, just pound the sharp end of that stake into the ground, and you’re done, you’re ready to plant that bale. I know this isn’t for everybody. This is for the do-it-yourself-ers, and I have lots of people that do this, and they’re actually really productive. These bales are actually more productive than a typical straw bale! But most of us in this audience probably have 20 bucks, we go out and buy a couple bales and we give this thing a go, right? But there are a lot of places on planet Earth where they don’t have John Deere balers, and they don’t have a Runnings they can run down and buy some straw bales. There are people starving to death! Places like North Korea, where the government owns all the soil. I have missionaries that just use this basic technique and they gather organic material from down by the river, old half-rotten logs and leaves off of trees and grass out of the ditch, and they compress it together, and they wrap old feed bags around it, ’cause they don’t have chicken wire over there, and they add some chicken manure as their nitrogen source, to get the cooking process started, the conditioning, and two weeks later, they can plant vegetables in there! So they go over to North Korea with a whole bunch of vegetable seeds, and all of a sudden, people can feed themselves, because they can make their own soil. They don’t have to rely on the government. And so it’s not really necessarily about us. It’s fun and it’s interesting for us, but for some people, it’s really a necessity to be able to make your bales. We have people in the Dominican Republic that make bales out of sugarcane stalk, left over after the rum harvest. In Haiti, as well, making bales out of sugarcane stalk. In Africa, it’s kudzu, this grass that grows along the riverbanks. It’s good for nothing except making new soil! And if you do it aboveground, it’s well enough drained that you can plant vegetables in it! This is one of our research rows, the N, shows one of the tomato plants. And you’ll see just how dark green they are, and very productive, probably 20, 25% more tomatoes on these bales, these compost bin bales, than the traditional straw bales. Whether you make your own bales, your little compost bin bales, or you buy bales of straw, you have to prep ’em before you can plant in ’em. This is what we call the conditioning process. I get emails in the springtime, and usually they come from California, for some reason, and they’ll say things like, “Mr. Karsten, I tried straw bale gardening. Last week I bought a straw bale, and I planted two tomatoes in the bale, and now they’re both dead. It doesn’t work.” And so I write ’em back and I say, “How did you prep the bales? How did you condition the bales before you planted in ’em?” And they’ll write me back and say, “I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about. I saw my neighbor growin’ a great big tall tomato out of a straw bale, so I just bought a straw bale and put a tomato in it!” I say, “Ah, you missed a really important step here. You need to condition the bales before you plant!” If you don’t condition the bales, what happens is, you have hungry bacteria inside that bale, and bacteria are looking for something to eat, which is a nitrogen source. If you plant a tomato in that bale, that’s what they’re gonna eat, because that tomato has nitrogen in it. So it’ll consume the roots, it’ll eat the potting mix, it’ll eat the stem, it’ll eat the branches, it’ll eat the whole thing as a source of food! And bacteria’s natural instinct is to colonize that environment, to grow and reproduce. And you plant another tomato, it’ll eat that one. You plant a third one, it’ll eat that one. Pretty soon, it gets full, and they get colonized. They’ve now had enough nitrogen that they’ve filled up the bale. Now you put a tomato in and it grows like crazy. The difference is, it took a while for that bacteria to colonize that entire bale. We’re gonna shortcut that process over 10 to 12 days by adding nitrogen. We begin this nitrogen sink reversal process by feeding the bacteria that are naturally occurring inside the bale. As these bacteria grow and divide, they vibrate. Every time a bacteria separates from one bacteria into two, it vibrates right in the middle, sort of pinches together. You can see on the slide right there, how one’s pinching in the middle. And they vibrate and they separate apart. It’s that vibration that causes your compost pile to heat up. It’s that vibration that causes the inside of these bales to heat up. Now bacteria are really tiny. You have to have a 400X magnification to even see them with the human eye! They’re very, very small. But there’s hundreds of millions of them, billions of them, inside that bale, and they’re all dividing every 15 minutes. Given the right conditions, they’re all dividing every 15 minutes. There’s a lot of shaking and vibrating happening inside that bale, early in the spring, and that’s what causes those bales to get warm. We begin this whole process by adding nitrogen and water to the bale. That feeds that bacteria. You don’t have to add bacteria. They’re already in there. You just need to feed the ones that are already there. You can do this organically using blood meal, Milorganite, other sources of nitrogen, but it takes a lot of nitrogen, so make sure you’re using enough nitrogen. I hear from people sometimes that try to use worm castings, or try to use compost tea or other sources of nitrogen. Just not enough oomph there to feed the bacteria. So really, blood meal works really well. Milorganite is a great alternative as well. Or if you’re a traditional gardener, just lawn fertilizer works really well, also. These are microorganisms, so they’re very tiny. You can’t see them with the naked eye. You gonna come on the 12th day of this process, when it’s planting time in your bale. You’re gonna make a hole in the bale and you’re gonna look down inside there. You’re gonna say, “I think this guy’s nuts. This bale looks just like it did 12 days ago. Nothing has changed.” If you had a microscope, you’d see everything has changed inside that bale. Because they’re microbes, they’re very tiny, you can’t see them, but they’re there, and you can tell they’re there, because that bale’s gonna get warm. As long as the bale’s getting warmer than air temperature, you know that there’s bacteria dividing inside that bale. Now these are harmless bacteria. These are not infectious type bacteria that are gonna hurt you. They’re decomposers, and that’s all their job is, is to break down organic material into nutrient molecules that can be reabsorbed again. You’ll see worms will love the inside of your bales, and your bales will fill up with worms. And what do worms leave behind? Worm castings, worm poop! And the plants love that, so we want the worms. And you’ll see that the decomposing straw bales will attract lots of worms. You’ll also see, mushrooms will bloom on the outsides of your bales. Sometimes lots of mushrooms will bloom. I get emails from people in the spring and they’ll say, “I just came in from my straw bale garden and the whole thing is ruined, it’s all covered in mushrooms!” And I write ’em back and I say, “Congratulations, you’ve just grown your first successful crop in your straw bales.” A crop of mushrooms usually will bloom at some point on your bales. And you know when the mushrooms bloom, your bales are ready to plant at that point. It means that the bales have kind of gone through that early-stage conditioning and started to break down. Sometimes mushrooms will bloom all summer long on your bales. It’s not a big deal. Just don’t eat the mushrooms. Or at least try ’em on somebody you don’t like before you eat ’em, ’cause you never know. Probably not a good idea to eat most of the mushrooms. They’re not gonna be morels or shiitakes or anything like that. They’re usually gonna be ink toppers or kinda gross mushrooms. The results of this 12-day conditioning process, you’ve now created a planting media that’s well-drained but holds moisture, has free radical nutrient molecules that can be absorbed by roots, there’s lots of nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, and lots of micronutrients available inside that bale. There’s probably some worms crawling around in there. It’s a perfect environment to plant anything, anything! You can pretty much grow anything. People ask me all the time, “Can I grow this? Can I grow that?” Yeah, pretty much anything. Not blueberries, ’cause that takes acidic soil. This is a neutral pH inside the bales, but in general, you can plant pretty much anything. There’s a few exceptions. I don’t recommend you plant sweet corn. Corn will grow fine, but you’re only gonna get about four stalks of corn out of a bale, so it’s not very productive. I also don’t recommend rhubarb and asparagus, because they’re perennial-rooted crops, and they’re gonna come back year after year, from the same root, and after one year, your bales are really gonna have collapsed a lot. Sometimes you can get a second year out of the bale, for root crops, things like potatoes and carrots, in a second-year bale, but really, count on the bale really for one year, in most circumstances. What we’re talking about growing are your typical vegetables that we all plant in our gardens. If you like the cucurbit family, you’re gonna love straw bale gardening. They do really well. All of your leafy greens, kale, chard, spinach, all the lettuce varieties do really well, and you can eat your lettuce out of your straw bale garden all summer. It never gets bitter like it does in the soil. That’s the big advantage. It stays a little cooler. Cabbage does really well, as do most root crops. Potatoes and carrots seem to do well. Especially a second-year bale, that they do even better, but you can grow them in a first-year bale. You also see vine crops, which are notoriously disease-sensitive, will perform much better in the straw bales, because there’s no lingering disease in the soil. Fusarium and Septoria that affect your tomatoes every year, anthrax, all those fungal diseases, those are in the soil. And they bounce up on the leaves of your plants because of splash from the rain or from your sprinklers. We don’t have to worry about that, because we’re up on top of a straw bale, and there’s none of those viruses or fungal diseases in the straw bale. Herbs will do really well. I like to put herbs in the sides of my bale. So you can do, basil does extraordinary well in straw bales, chives, oregano, mint, whatever your favorites are. I like to plug ’em in the sides of the bale. Just use your shovel handle and punch a hole right in the side of the bale between the two strings. Get a nice, deep hole, and then shove the roots way to the middle of the bale, so the herbs will come right out the side of the bale, and you can grow beautiful herbs out the side, and then grow your vegetables out the top of the bale. Flowers will do well. I like impatiens and petunias and marigolds to look nice on the sides, and then you can also do summer bulbs. If you like gladiolas, or dahlia bulbs, they do really well in the straw bales, and now you don’t have to dig up the ground and plant them. You could just bust the bale open in the fall and harvest your bulbs back out of the straw bale, so it makes it really easy to do. Gladiolas, get about 50 to 75 gladiolas in one bale. And then when they bloom, you cut ’em and make vases out of ’em. It’s not a display garden, it’s really a nursery for a cut garden, that you would bring the flowers into the house. Why you’re gonna love your straw bale garden. Well, for most people, the number one selling point is that they don’t have to weed their garden. There’s no weed seeds. I tell people, if you don’t have to remember to weed your garden and you have an automated soaker, your little digital timer on your soaker hose, so you don’t have to remember to water your garden, you better put a post-it note in your kitchen to remind you you have a garden! ‘Cause sometimes you forget, halfway through the summer! There’s really no work involved in this method of gardening. Once everything’s planted, you just come back and harvest! There’s not a lot of weeding and other maintenance that you have to do. There’s no more heavy work. You don’t have to rototill. You don’t have to double-dig and get the shovel and the spade out. That’s a thing of the past. You can do all your gardening with a hand trowel. It’s never too wet or too dry. So even in those spring seasons where your neighbors are all complaining about, “It’s been raining all the time and I haven’t been able to get my garden in,” you can say, “Oh, my garden’s all in. I planted while it was raining, with my raincoat on, because my bales only get so wet. They can’t be over-watered.” So it doesn’t matter how much it rains. No more crop rotation, because we have brand new soil inside that bale every spring. So you don’t have to worry at all about carryover of disease or insect problems. Better prevention of bugs is really to do with the air flow, especially if you build those trellises above the bales. Plants are up off the ground, better air circulation, less insect problems. Less disease problems, because of how we water. Using that soaker hose or dripper-style hose, where you only get the roots wet, you don’t get the tops wet, if you keep your plant foliage dry, you’ll have a lot less problems with fungal disease on your vegetable plants. Less possibility of frost, mainly because if it does threaten frost, we can pull that plastic tent over the top of our bales, and protect the plants from the cold nighttime temperatures. Lower cost really goes to your labor. It’s 80% less labor to get the same amount of production out of your garden. Time is money, right? You wanna spend your summer doin’ somethin’ other than pulling weeds and watering every day, plant a straw bale garden, and you’ll have great success with a lot less input time. And it’s productive, you plant the tops of the bales, the sides of the bales, the ends of the bales. If you look out on the 4th of July and you can still see straw on your straw bale garden, you don’t have enough stuff planted. Get out there and put somethin’ else in that bale! Because the sides should be planted, the ends, so all you see is green comin’ outta those bales, at that point of the year. So a very productive method of gardening. Some people think you just put one thing in a bale. Some of our bales, we have seven or eight plants comin’ outta the same bale, so don’t be afraid to put lots of stuff in that bale. Now I have a bunch of pictures here at the end, but I’d love to take some questions, if anybody has questions about anything. Otherwise, I’m gonna flip through some of these pictures.

– A question, Joel.

– Yes, sir.

– So I did a couple bales this year for the first time. But the bales, after a while, kind of fell apart.

– Yeah, they start to collapse, yep, as they decompose. Well, for one thing, slow down your watering. If you’ve been watering, a lot of times, if you water a lot, it causes that more rapid decomposition, and they’ll tend to fall over. But as they start to lean, you can just push a board up against a leaning bale and pound a stake in next to it, and that kinda keeps it upright, so your plants don’t tip over. But I have some zucchini I plant, and I know, zucchini’s gonna grow so fast, it’s gonna tip the bale over, and I just know that’s gonna happen and it doesn’t matter, it just keeps right on growin’, even when the bale tips over sideways. Yeah, so I don’t even worry about it, I just, your plants usually keep right on growing. And if you have a trellis up above, that’ll help also. Takes the weight of the plant rather than allowing it to tip over. Like a tomato in a cage would be real tippy, have lots of weight. Any other questions? Usually somebody asks me, “What about mice? Don’t straw bales attract mice?” That’s a common thing that people think, and a dry bale of straw will attract mice! Makes a nice mouse hotel! But a wet straw bale has no interest from a mouse. Mice can’t swim, and when that bale’s soaking wet, they don’t wanna have babies inside that bale. They don’t wanna live inside that bale. So you don’t have to worry at all about mice. It’s not an issue, a concern at all. If you do have moles and voles in your yard, sometimes it works good to put down some hardware cloth on the ground, some real fine mesh wire, and then put the bales on top. That way, the moles and voles won’t come in, or gophers won’t come in from the bottom. It’s not gonna attract them to your yard, but if you already have them in your yard, it’s not a bad idea to put down some wire. Yes, sir?

– Is it high enough to discourage rabbits?

– “Is it high enough to discourage rabbits?” Dumb rabbits, yeah! Smart ones in my neighborhood, I’ve been doin’ it long enough, they’ve gotten smart. They’ll jump right up on top. But people will tell me, I’ll hear that from people all the time, that the rabbits don’t find their stuff up on top of there. So it must take ’em a little while to learn where to look, because they’re not familiar with the straw bale garden. So I think it can discourage them a little bit. I still have squirrels that’ll bite my tomatoes just like other people’s, so yeah, unfortunately, we can’t get rid of all the livestock in the neighborhood, but it’s certainly, I just say grow enough that you can afford to give up a little bit to the wildlife, and still have plenty for yourself. Yes.

– Oh, hi!

– Hi!

– I’m mostly out on my asphalt driveway. I started with nine, last year was 12, this year is 24 bales. And I have awful blossom-end rot this year, which I know can cause . I’m wondering what you’ve experienced with blossom-end rot in the bales, and the timing of that watering.

– Well, blossom-end rot can often be attributed to a lack of calcium and magnesium, which get leached out when you water a lot. So what I like to do when I plant my tomatoes and my peppers, I throw about two or three TUMS antacid tablets down in the planting hole.

– When you plant?

– When I plant, yup. And then they’ll dissolve real slowly over the summer, and that provides excessive calcium that will help supplement for whatever you’re leaching. And then, Epsom salts work really great. I mean, I know you hear the wives’ tales about “Epsom salt solves everything.” It’s a source of magnesium, and when you mix that in with water and spray the leaves, it seems to help with blossom-end rot, as well.

– For the season, or?

– Just a couple times when the plants first start to develop fruit. So right after flowering, when they start to develop fruit, just a couple of applications. It doesn’t take much. A couple teaspoons in a gallon of water, and Epsom salts are super cheap, so you can buy a whole bag of Epsom salt for $1.99, so enough to last you for 50 years of straw bale gardening. And just a little light spray, and that supplements a little bit that micronutrient that they’re lacking.

– Excellent.

– And that’ll take care of it.

– And one other question-

– I’m glad to hear that you’ve grown from nine bales to 24 now, that’s good.

– Yeah, well, my friend is Kate Clarity, who you know-

– Oh, sure!

– So, yeah.

– Yeah, I know Kate real well.

– Wondering about, I know book number two has a twist on maybe over-wintering the bales outside to get that started, does it mention that?

– Yeah, if you can find bales in the fall, usually-

– I saved some.

– Yeah, well, usually they’re easier to find in the fall, ’cause farmers harvest in late summer, and then, of course, they don’t want to have to put ’em in the barn, to store ’em all winter, so they’re gonna sell ’em, usually, for less in the fall. And a lot of people buy ’em for Halloween, et cetera. So if you do find a source in the fall, buy your bales, bring ’em home, put ’em right in the garden, where you’re gonna use ’em. And you don’t have to cover ’em up or anything, just let ’em winter, let ’em get rained on and snowed on, it won’t hurt a thing. In the spring, put your soaker hoses on and turn it on. If there’s any mice hidin’ out in there, they’re gonna split, they’re gonna take off, so you don’t have to worry about that. And then do your same conditioning process that you normally would do, same conditioning process, yep. You’ll see the bales will be ahead of your bales that you just bought, and didn’t over-winter, but you still need to do the conditioning process, to get that burst of heat inside the bales. So you still have to add the nitrogen. Maybe a little bit less, but you will see, you still have to do the majority of the conditioning process.

– Thank you!

– All right, yeah! Thanks for the question, good question. Well, thank you very much. If anybody still has questions, I’ll stick around here for awhile. One more question?

– Could you tell a little more about the conditioning process, how much-

– The conditioning process, okay, we’re gonna do it over 10 days, and days one, three, and five, if you’re doing it using traditional fertilizer, like lawn fertilizer, you’re gonna just use a half a cup. Then on days seven, eight, and nine, you’re gonna use a quarter of a cup. And on day number 10, you use one cup of 10-10-10. This is on each bale. So it ends up being 2 1/4 cups of fertilizer on the bale, total, and then a cup of 10-10-10. If you’re doin’ it organically, you’re gonna use blood meal or Milorganite, it takes quite a bit more. It takes about three cups on days one, three, and five, and then a cup and a half on days seven, eight, and nine. And then one cup of bone meal and one cup of wood ashes on the 10th day. And that will take care of all your nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium needs, to get that bacteria fed and to get the plants started. Now, as the bale decomposes, it’ll provide all the other nutrients that your plants need. Throughout the summer, if your tomatoes look like they’re turnin’ a light green color, it’s because when you water, you leach nitrogen out of the bales. So you might wanna, if you’re organic, use a little fish emulsion. That helps juice ’em up a little bit, gives ’em a little more nitrogen. If you’re a traditional gardener, the magic blue water, Miracle Gro, that kind of thing, will get your plants the nitrogen that they need to continue growing. But usually, you don’t have to add a whole lot. Especially if you’re good about watering, you don’t over-water. Just enough water that you barely see anything comin’ out the bottom, or right before it starts comin’ out the bottom, then stop watering. ‘Cause if you keep watering, it’s just gonna leach nitrogen and nutrients out of the bale. So try to catch it right before water runs out the bottom. Thank you, again, all, for coming. I appreciate it. I hope you guys all learned somethin’!