Welcome, everyone. Today we’re gonna have a little conversation about conditioning straw bales for your straw bale garden.
We set up a special experiment here in the backyard where we have 12 bales set up, and each bale is set up to represent one day of the conditioning process. So down here we have the first bale, which has had no conditioning done to it, it’s brand new, and then bale number two, bale number three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, and 12. The 12th-day bale is ready to plant.
So we’re gonna take you through the whole sequence of exactly how you do the conditioning in order to get the bale from having had nothing done to it until day 12 when it’s ready to plant.
On the first day, you’re gonna see your bales are probably gonna be about air temperature. That’s pretty normal. We have a thermometer here, a digital read thermometer. Right now, it’s 60 degrees outside, and you see inside the bale, it says 61. So it’s about air temperature, maybe slightly warmer than air temperature one degree or so. Don’t be surprised if your 1st-day bale, if it sat out overnight, and it’s cool overnight, it might still be holding onto some of that cooler temperature from overnight. So it might even be a degree or two cooler inside the bale than it is air temperature.
Now on this day, we’re gonna apply a half a cup of the high-nitrogen lawn fertilizer that we talk about, what fertilizer to use. You could find that information in the book or, of course, on our website. Something with at least 20% nitrogen is what we’re looking for. And if you read the contents label, just make sure it doesn’t have more than 20% of the nitrogen that is slow release.
So we’re looking for something that’s quick release. It’s the cheap stuff, folks. It’s at least expensive lawn fertilizer that you wanna find. So you’re gonna put half a cup of that on, and you’re gonna water it in on that day number one.
Now by the day number two, let’s stick our thermometer in here, and you’ll see that the temperature has actually increased a few degrees. It’s up six, seven degrees warmer than the 1st-day bale. So just adding a little nitrogen, a little water yesterday to this bale has now increased the temperature. It looks like it’s gonna stop at 69, 70 degrees. If we got a probe that was a little deeper, you might even find warmer temperatures way down inside the bale. So it’s about 10 degrees warmer than it was on day number one. We get to day number three. On day number two, all we do is water that bale.
This day, day number three, we’re gonna add another half cup of fertilizer. Just sprinkle it on from end to end, from side to side, and then water it in.
When we talk about watering your fertilizer in, we don’t mean standing out there for an hour with a hose trying to wash all that fertilizer down into the bale. What we’re talking about is using a gallon of water per bale. So if you wanna use your sprayer into your hose, you’re welcome to try and do that, work a little bit of it in, but no more than about 60 seconds per bale, and that’s it.
What I prefer to use is what I call warmed water. What warmed water is, is not water from your hot water heater in the house. It’s water that today is cold water, you put it in a bucket, and by tomorrow it will have warmed up to air temperature. Early in the spring, usually your air temperature is gonna be quite a bit warmer than your soil temperature. Remember, your soil temperature is where your water lines are running through. So when you have really cold soil, you’re gonna have cold water coming out of your water pipes. So that cold water is gonna cool down the bacteria. What we’re trying to get here, remember, is bacteria growth, reproduction of bacteria inside the bales. So in day number three, one gallon from our buckets, one gallon of water to help wash our fertilizer down in.
Day number four, all we’re gonna do is add water on day number four. Day number five, we’re again gonna come back and add another half cup of the high-nitrogen lawn fertilizer and one gallon of water. Day number six, all we do is water. Put a little water on the bale, just enough to keep it moist.
We’re not trying to water plants here ’cause there’s no plants. What we’re trying to do is keep it moist so that the bacteria can continue to reproduce. They need three things. They need somewhat warm temperatures. If it’s as cold outside as it is inside your refrigerator in the house, bacteria is not gonna grow. That’s why we have refrigerators because we put food in there, and we don’t want bacteria to grow on it, so we put it in the refrigerator. So if it’s only 38 degrees outside, don’t bother trying to condition your straw bales because you’re not gonna get much bacteria growth when it’s that cold.
So they need warm temperatures, they need a little bit of moisture, not a lot, but a little bit of moisture, and they need a food source, which for bacteria is nitrogen. That can come in natural forms of nitrogen, which would be an organic process, something like blood meal, or feather meal is another option. There are many organic fertilizers out there. Another one that works really well is Milorganite. That has about 5 or 6% nitrogen in it. You need something with a minimum of 5% nitrogen by concentrate. Even if you’re doing it organically, it has to have at least 5% in order to get enough volume of fertilizer worked into the bale to make it work for this bacteria growth. Regular lawn fertilizer only takes a half a cup ’cause it’s pretty strong stuff. It’s usually gonna be over 20% nitrogen.
So, on day number six, all we do is water. Now days seven, eight, nine, all three days, we’re gonna add fertilizer, but we’re gonna cut the rate in half. So instead of adding a half cup, like we have been on days one, three, and five, now we’re gonna cut it down to a 1/4 of a cup. But we’re gonna apply that on all three days, seven, eight, and nine. These are the three important days when you’re getting the most rapid production of bacteria. And you’ll see they tend to be the three days when your bales are the warmest. We’re gonna check that out here. Let’s stick our thermometer in this.
This is bale number eight, day number eight, and we’re just gonna see what it jumps up to. I tested this one a little earlier, and it got up to about 104 degrees, so it’s nice and warm. Considering it’s 60 degrees outside, that’s 44 degrees warmer than air temperature. That means there’s a lot of bacteria growing inside of this bale. Yup, and it jumps right back up here. It’s at 103 and 103.7, eight, nine, 104 degrees. So, it’s just above 104 degrees. Probably too hot to plant in. When the bales are above 105 degrees, I tell people avoid planting in that bale till it cools off down under 105 degrees. Even 100 degrees is a good temperature. At that point, you’re gonna be safe to plant.
Okay, so days seven, eight, nine, quarter of a cup and a gallon of water on those three days, and that’s it. You’re gonna start to really smell things. If you get your nose down in there, and take a good sniff of that bale, you’re gonna see it smells a little bit, smells like decomposition. It’s not a terrible smell, it’s not a bad smell, but you can certainly smell that it’s becoming soil. That bacteria is turning that straw into soil particles.
Now we get up here to days number seven, eight, and nine. This is the last day of the quarter cup and one gallon of water, and then we come to bale number 10.
On the 10th day, it’s kind of a special day. This is the day when we’re gonna apply one cup per bale of 10-10-10. If you can’t find 10-10-10, something that has the last two numbers, which are the phosphorus and potassium. You could find 12-12-12, or 14-14-14, whatever, as long as it’s got a little bit of phosphorus and potassium in it. We’re looking for about 10% or more phosphorus and potassium.
Now what’s special about phosphorus and potassium is nitrogen is very soluble and will tend to easily wash into and through and out of a bale, where phosphorus and potassium won’t. They tend to bind with soil particles and then persist inside the bale. The problem, if we put phosphorus and potassium on our bale, back on day number one, there weren’t any soil particles inside that bale. So when we apply phosphorus and potassium, they would wash right out because there’s nothing form to bind with.
When we get here to day number 10, now we’ve got some soil particles inside this bale. It’s gonna be hard to see ’em, they’re microscopic, but there are soil particles that have begun to build inside of that bale. When we add phosphorus and potassium on the 10th day, as it goes down through that bale, it’s gonna grab ahold of and bind with those soil particles. So we’re gonna get a nice distribution of phosphorus and potassium throughout the profile inside that bale, all the way from the top to the bottom. So apply a cup of 10-10-10 and a gallon of water, again, to wash it in.
Day number 11 is your rest day. This is the day where you kick back and maybe go to the Garden Center and pick up a few plants because tomorrow, day number 12, is planting day.
So on day number 12, you’re gonna start making your holes for your transplants. Now when it comes to making a hole in a straw bale, depending on the bales you bought, sometimes they’re really tight. They’re tightly compressed. And even though you’ve been adding water and fertilizer, the bale is still pretty tight, and it’s hard to get a hole in that bale. If that happens to you, just grab a pliers, stick the jaws of the pliers in, pull a cup of chunks of straw out. You’ll see that gets a hole started. You can pull out some more straw with your finger, make a hole big enough to put that transplant down into the bale.
If you’re planting seeds, you need to make a seed bed. So you’re gonna put an inch or 1/2 an inch, inch of potting mix or planting mix, something, not shovels of soil from your garden. If you do that, you’re gonna add weed seeds, and you’re gonna bring in potential disease and insect problems. So, get some sterile planting mix that doesn’t have any weed seeds, doesn’t have any disease or insect problems in it, a brand new bag from the Garden Center, sprinkle a little on top of the bale, and put your seeds in.
Now if you’re planting big seeds, big peas or bean seeds, those are great, big. You could easily see those. Just stick them down in the bale with your finger. Just get them about a knuckle deep or so. That’s all you need to do. If you’re planting big seeds, they can go directly into the bale. You don’t really even need to worry much about the potting mix.
For the tiny seeds, however, like carrots, radish, other things that have small seeds, they need the seed bed in order to hold that seed in position so that it can get moisture and has time to germinate.
So you’ll see the bales don’t look a whole lot different from day number one to day number 12. If you didn’t know what was happening with this experiment, you might think all these bales are at the same place in the process, but they’re really not. This tells the difference, is the thermometer. You can tell the difference in the temperature from day number one all the way up to day number 12.
Don’t worry if your bales don’t ever get really hot. Sometimes people will email me and they’ll say, “Oh, my bales never really got that warm. Is it okay to still plant?” Yes, absolutely. As long as you follow the protocol, even if your bales don’t get super hot inside, they only get to 80, 90, or 100 degrees, it’s really not important that they get super hot.
If the air temperature is really warm, you’re gonna see that your bales might get a little bit warmer. But if the air temperature is pretty cool, the bales might never get really super warm, but they’re still gonna be conditioned by day number 12. They’re gonna be far enough along that if you plant on day number 12, your bales will never get above that 105 degrees, which is really the point, where we’re gonna have some depth loss if we do transplants into the bale. So go ahead and plant on day number 12.
If you’re doing this organically, make sure you’re checking your temperatures because we wanna make sure that the temperatures fall under 105. And I always tell people to give yourself an extra five days if you’re using the organic materials to do this process because it takes a little longer for that material to be mineralized by the bacteria and utilized inside the bale. So if you’re doing it organically, give yourself an extra five days ’cause you might need it. On the last day of the process, you might not be ready to plant. Bales might still be too warm. So give yourself a little bit of extra time.
But that’s the basics of conditioning from day number one to day number 12. They don’t change a lot on the outside. Matter of fact, they don’t even change a lot on the inside. You make a hole inside that bale, you’re gonna look down inside, then you’re gonna say, “I think this guy might be crazy. Nothing’s happened. It still looks like a straw bale inside here. This hasn’t turned into some magic soil.”
It’s not gonna look like soil inside the bale. Biologically, it’s become soil. If you had a microscope, you could tell a big difference inside that bale, but to the naked eye, it’s not gonna look a whole lot different. But you need to trust me.
By day number 12, you’re gonna be ready to plant. So make a hole and get things in that bale, and get ’em started as early as possible. Nice and warm inside there is gonna help with the root production early in the process. So make sure you get things planted as early as you can wherever you are in the world.
So that’s the basics from day one to day 12 of how you get your bales ready to plant for your straw bale garden. Good luck! Get out there and plant those bales.