And what about doing it organic?

I've never heard of this before, but when I was visiting my uncle in NC, I noticed he had squash and tomatoes growing directly out of haybales! He copied an article about it for me, and it basically instructs you to spend 10 days preparing the bales by sprinkling various fertilizers on them and watering it in each day.

I'd love to try this, but I'd want to go organic (The amount of chemicals mentioned in the directions really irked me!). BUT - if I bought a bunch of equivalent organic fertilizers... I wonder how much it would add up to in cost...

I haven't googled it yet... but wondered if anybody here had tried it.

you could just train levi to fertilize the hay bales :lol:

Great idea! That wouldn't even really require training...

I've never heard of it but it sounds quite interesting!

Actually, having a vegetarian animal pee on the hay bales wouldn't be a bad idea. Know any horses who could come over and give them a sprinkle?

I may be trying potatoes that way for the fall crop. I'll let you know if I do. :)

I've heard of this. Also try throwing seeds on the ground and then covering with hay and start watering. I also read a book a long time ago about a women on the east coast that has an amazing greenhouse. When she first moved to her home she didn't have a toilet and she said that she would throw her urine bowls in the same spot everytime she emptied them. she noticed the next spring that place the plants grew like crazy!! She didn't put her pee on food she sold, but for their home produce she puts pee on it all. Not sure if she was a vegetarian or not.

Ok - I found this:

NO DIG Garden - Straw Bale Method Fact Sheet (http://www.aboutthegarden.com.au/FSDODIGBaletext.html)

YEP - lots of purchased organic fertilizers to make this work... probably too expensive to be practical.

We do it. We plant potatoes (my fav in the bales because the potatoes come out clean! Just reach in and take what you need). We fertilize with bone and blood meal (on top of the hay) and that's about all we do. We've also done tomatoes and cukes. We don't even dig the earth underneath, but we do use a lot of hay (on the potatoes we also put on about 2 inches of dark mulch so the sun doesn't get to the tubers).

It is REALLY easy! (my neighbors thought I was crazy till they saw what we got!)

Patti (SimpleSpirit) does a version of this. She took hay bales, and made a raised bed out of them last year... than this year she took the bales apart and used them as mulch on her garden and the garden was the raised bed area, PLUS all the haybales around it. I thought this was genius.

I am not sure if she used the bales as soil like you are talking about... but the idea of using the hay is intreging to me to the extreme. I need to get some any way to mulch my squash that are getting eaten by some form of ground rot.

Val